Tourist information sources at different stages of the travel experience

Abstract

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.

Glass half-full? A comprehensive PLS-SEM approach to explore the pandemic’s effect on wine tourism intentions

“…Involvement created by dedicating time even to online wine-related content can affect and predict wine tourism intentions in the next 12 months, highlighting the importance of “being at the right time, in the right place” to capture tourists’ attention. Therefore, adequately planned marketing and communication actions in the pre-visit stages of the travel experience – the dreaming and the planning phase (Gretzel, 2021; Fernández-Cavia et al , 2020) – are vital to wineries and destination management operators (DMOs), and particularly important when tourism flows are affected by government regulation or seasonality.…”

Trends in Destination Choice in Tourism Research: A 25-year Bibliometric Review

“…The research related to factors influencing DC has become more relevant with researchers trying to research psychological, social, demographic characteristics such as age and education to be influence DC and travel behaviour. Information search paradigm, have significant importance, the pre-, during and post-DC decisions (Fernández et al, 2020). Mass media sources, travel habits, perceived risk and safety-related issues, are of primary concern for selecting DC along with social networks and word of mouth.…”

uso de las redes sociales y su relación con la decisión de compra del turista

“…El turista 2.0, con su competencia digital (Fernández-Cavia et al, 2020), puede acceder directamente a la oferta saltándose los intermediarios con sus compras online. Enfrentadas al omnipresente fenómeno de la infoxicación, las empresas deben recurrir al valor añadido para seguir siendo relevantes al cliente, mediante contenidos de calidad y herramientas útiles en sus portales y redes sociales.…”