Destinations 'talk' about themselves via online media to build strong brand personalities. However, previous research points to the influence of other associations linked to the destination in determining the credibility of the aforementioned personality. This research aims to identify the potential of certain types of functional associations -attractions-in strengthening projected personality through discourse. With this aim in mind, we analyze the content of twelve official European urban destination websites. The results expand on previous research by identifying how different aspects of what a destination has to offer help portray personality traits. There is huge potential to use attractions to better project desired personality traits, which leads to a better fit between the personality and the overall projected image. The findings have significant implications both for brand managers to enable them to optimize their communication, and for future research. The projected personality of destinations should not be studied independently from the functional dimension of brand image.

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Tourist destination managers must design effective communication strategies as part of their promotional tasks. In order to do so, destinations need to know what sources of information tourists actually use during the stages of a trip. Previous studies have partially addressed this issue but only used a limited list of sources analysed or only focused on three stages (pre-, during and post-). Our study considers a fourth stage-destination choice-, and also 27 sources of information were included in the questionnaires sent to our sample of analysis composed of 1,621 tourists from the four main countries visiting Spain: France, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom. The results confirm the prevalence of Internet search engines for destination choice and trip preparation phases, but also point out to the importance of recommendations from friends and family in the destination choice stage, of maps and plans during the trip, and of Facebook in the post-trip stage. It is also shown that, among the official channels of the destinations, only the website stands out as one of the most consulted sources.

Building a strong and consistent brand personality is crucial to position cities in the global context and a key element to influence potential visitors’ behavior. City brands’ communication endeavors to project consistent messages to position a unique personality in consumer’s mind. However, the variety of target groups that cities aim to attract and the number of stakeholders contributing with their messages to create the city brand makes it more difficult to uphold a single consistent proposition. Thus, brand managers require resources to coordinate and assess the consistency of the city’s personality projected through various sources of information. This study proposes a more accurate measure to assess the city brand projected personality [CBPP] on the websites. It extends the methodological approach proposed by Pitt et al. (2007) by considering two additional variables: the prevalence of the personality traits within the discourse and their link to the brand name. Furthermore, the study tests the CBPP measure to identify the consistency of Barcelona’s projected personality through two different stakeholders’ websites. The empirical study shows the capability of the measures introduced to assess more accurately the personality projected through several sources. The CBPP approach offers managerial implications by which marketers can assess more accurately the projected personality and more easily assess the consistency between different official messages.

A new analysis system for evaluating website quality is presented. It is characterized by its ability to interrelate and evaluate both technical and strategic aspects of a website. It is based on the premise that, while the technical aspects that govern the operation and functionality have a great impact on the quality of a website, they do not guarantee its success on their own. This approach differs from those commonly adopted in analysis systems, since until now most of them have been developed by adopting a predominantly operational or functional view.