Destinations' Information Competition and Web Reputation

Abstract

Destination managers are investing considerable effort (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 destination-related information in the so-called online tourism 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 file analysis for a given destination, a set of nine keywords was used to perform search activities on two major search engines (Google and Yahoo!). Search results were first organized and described in order to describe the destinations' information competitors. Second, a content analysis study was performed in order to examine topics and arguments of the retrieved results that are shaping the Web reputation of destinations. The article shows 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.

Online visit opinions about attractions of the religious heritage: an argumentative approach

“…WOM can be even considered as the primary enabler of economic and social activity in most of the ancient and medieval communities, which had not yet established formal law systems of contract enforcement. WOM has been showed to play a major role for customers' buying decisions, and WOM from friends and relatives has been found to be the most commonly used information source for travelers before they make a travel decision (Beiger and Laesser 2004;Inversini, Cantoni, and Buhalis 2009).…”

The Role of Internet and SEO in Branding Destinations: Case of Albania as a New Destination in Balkans

“…In the case of tourism industry, travelers depend of comments about past tourism experiences of others to decide in an effectively informed way, depending on official websites (e.g., destinations and hotels) as well as on unofficial ones (e.g., tripadvisor.com, blogs) as stated by Inversini and Buhalis, (2009). continues that, to increase tourism revenues and enhance innovation and competitiveness , web pages and social media should be used correctly for communicating the destination uniqueness.…”

“…According to Inversini and Buhalis (2009) before making any decisions about their travel reservations, travelers spend time locating appropriate information on the Internet, checking different information providers (Vermeulen and Seegers, 2009). So, a lot of studies in the online information search field (Xiang et al, 2008), have attracted the attention of researchers.…”

Online representation of Switzerland as a tourism destination: An exploratory research on a Chinese microblogging platform

“…De Ascaniis and Morasso (2011) studied UGCs from travel forum posts and reviews using argumentation theory to analyze the reasons why tourists like a destination (Lugano, Switzerland) and to grasp its touristic values on highlighted social media. Inversini et al (2009) investigated destination-related information in unofficial websites such as blogs, review websites, wikis by querying search engines, and then analyzing topics and arguments from the retrieved results in order to examine the online image of several European destinations. Previous research shows that UGCs as unofficial information resources are of equal importance to the official ones and Destination Management Organizations need to take destination-related UGCs into account when they are creating marketing for their destinations.…”

“…Additionally, ICTs allowed the generation of electronic word-of-mouth, which in turn gathers countless online discourses. These discourses are becoming more influential than official sources in the decision making to visit destination by prospective travelers (Inversini, Cantoni, & Buhalis, 2009;Xiang & Gretzel, 2010). Such discourses can be found online in the form of user-generated contents (UGCs), such as travel blogs, travel review websites, and virtual communities, and might be analyzed as efficient sources of information for the investigation of the online representation of different objects, for instance tourism destinations.…”