In recent years a technological and sociological paradigm shift has taken place in the Internet that is often referred to as Web 2.0. Companies and individuals have started to adapt existing Web sites to the new standards and principles and created new types of Web services and communities. The tourism domain is no exception to this trend-new tourism communities emerged and long-established ones integrated new features to keep up with this trend. In this paper we are evaluating eight tourism communities with respect to Web 2.0. Each community is evaluated based on a criteria catalogue that draws ideas from online community studies. The findings are discussed in the context of the tourist life cycle that is structured in a pre-trip, on-site and after-trip phase. The value for the traveller is highlighted for each phase and potential problems are discussed.
The World Wide Web has become an important source of information for tourists planning their vacation. So, destination recommendation systems supporting users in their decision making process by suggesting suitable holiday destinations or packages based on user profiles are a vivid area of research. Considering the complex and often tedious task to obtain such profiles we are exploring a new direction to manufacture user profiles. Having in mind that a picture paints a thousand words we conducted an online survey that allows investigating the relationship between tourism-related photographs and tourist types. In a nutshell, our findings show a significant relationship between different tourist types and the preference for particular visual impressions conveyed by photographs. Thus, tourist types can be determined by representative photos without necessarily requesting users to provide additional information.
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