Destinations Information Competition and Web Reputation
Alessandro Inversini, Lorenzo Cantoni, Dimitrios Buhalis Buhalis
Abstract
Destination managers are investing considerable efforts (i.e. time, resources and money) to market their destinations on the Internet. In addition to official destination websites, many unofficial websites are populating the results pages of search engines, diffusing almost the same contents as official destinations websites. The aim of this study is to investigate the information market available to the traveler searching for destinations related information, in the so-called tourism online space. Search engines are indexing not only official websites but also any other websites such as blogs, review websites, wikis, reviews, etc., which are available online. Starting from a log files analysis for a given destination, a set of nine keywords has been used to perform search activities on two major search engines (Google and Yahoo!). Search results have been firstly organized and described in order to describe the destinations’ information competitors. Secondly, a content analysis study has been performed in order to examine topics and arguments of the retrieved results that are shaping the web reputation of destinations. The paper demonstrates that unofficial sources of information are equally important with respect to officially provided information. Hence destinations need to manage their brand and online reputation holistically by attempting to coordinate the players offering information about themselves and also amalgamating the entire range of information and service providers on platforms of experience creation.
Journal of Information Technology & Tourism (ISSN: 1098-3058) is hosted at MODUL University Vienna and published by Cognizant.