A tourism destination website usually is a Business to Customer (B2C site), whose main target are ... successful social networking or content sharing websites.
Tourism Destination Websites Introduction A tourism destination website usually is a Business to Customer (B2C site), whose main target are the tourists. Websites can support all the core activities of a Tourism Destination. They are useful in all the areas of e-tourism and can be used for branding, promotion, and ecommerce. A destination can also create micro-sites or sub-sites with specialized content, to communicate e.g., an event, to promote an attraction or to sell a package. A Business to Business B2B website can be developed to communicate and interact with tourism operators or other stakeholders. Intranet sections can be used as interfaces to the information system of the destination management organization (DMO). Critical modules for a DMO are those for customer relationship management (CRM), online reservation, dynamic packaging, recommendation, and review management. Significance Tourism destination websites play a critical role for their business model (Timmers, 1998), and depending on their level of interactivity with the stakeholders in the destination, they allow the realisation of more integrated organizational models. For tourists, a destination website represents the official source of information and as such, the website is a critical hub of the variety of websites and applications of any kind related to the destination. The development of a tourism destination website requires the same approach of an Information System: technology, organization and management have to be integrated to contribute to address the business challenges of the destination (fn: Laudon & Laudon, 2012). Investments for the website have to be evaluated in respect of the destination strategies and goals. The realization of a website requires a multi-disciplinary approach and, differently from traditional information systems, implies continuous updating and interventions (fn: Pressman & Lowe, 2008). History Web engineering is the area of computer science for the development of quality tourism websites (fn: Kappel et al., 2003) according to web standards (fn: W3C - The World Wide Web Consorzio: www.w3.org), (fn: Zeldman, 2009) and stakeholders’ goals and requirements. Quality models support the assessment of tourism destination websites to gather information to design or redesign them, and to compare them to competitors’ websites (fn: https://etourism.economia.unitn.it/). While there is not an official standard model for the website quality, there are a number of models including disparate characteristics. Such characteristics can be described and classified according to the loci of the rhetoric (fn: Cicero, 58BC), interpreting them as quality dimensions (fn: Mich et al. 2003). Even with a different emphasis or denomination, existing models for website quality consider: -‐
identity, related to the graphical design, and to visual identity, brand and image identity
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content, very relevant for an information dependent sector as tourism services or functionalities for online transactions maintenance, that is the correct functioning of all the elements of the website identification, or online visibility and use of social platforms of any kind usability (fn: Nielsen Jacob: http://www.useit.com), including accessibility (ft: WAI – Web Accessibility Initiative: www.w3.org/WAI), and associated with easy of use, efficiency and efficacy (fn: Krug, 2005) feasibility, less often included in quality models, deals with project management issues; online analytics are used to measure the popularity or the success of the website.
The inception of the Web 2.0 (fn : O’reilly, 2005) opened a wide range of online space a tourism destination can exploit. A DMO can create one or more official presences on the most successful social networking or content sharing websites. Altogether, all these spaces constitute the DMO’s online or web presence and should implement a planned web presence strategy (Mich, 2010). While the official B2C website is the hub of the web presence, Web 2.0 websites are potentially useful to reach a larger audience and to support new forms of web marketing. Important trends with a significant impact on the decisions on the web presences of a DMO and on the development of their websites are the access by devices different from a personal computer, mainly from mobile phones or tablets; the increasing diffusion of applications (apps); and the availability of localized services based on the position of the users. These trends and the futures ones are realising more and more the “anywhere, anytime” paradigm of the ubiquitous web, revolutionizing all the tourism sectors and demand a constant effort to innovate all the kinds of the tourism destination websites and presences. Examples A few studies have analyzed and compared tourism destination websites to identify best practices and guidelines (fn: ). According to those studies and to popularity indexes available on line (e.g., alexa.com), examples of successful tourism destination websites and web presence strategies, just to name a few, are Singapore (fn: http://www.yoursingapore.com/) and Thailand (fn: http://www.tourismthailand.org/) in Asia, Norway (fn: http://www.visitnorway.com/), Spain (fn: http://www.spain.info/) and Switzerland (fn: http://www.myswitzerland.com/), in Europe, Oberoesterreich (fn: http://www.oberoesterreich.at) and Bayern (Fn: http://www.bayern.by/) as regional destinations in the Alps, Trentino (fn: http://visittrentino.it ) and Tuscany (fn: http://www.turismo.intoscana.it/) in Italy, Berlin (fn: http://www.visitberlin.de/) as a city destination. References Cicero MT. 58BC. De Invenzione. In EH. Warmington (ed), January 1949. De Invenzione. De Optimo Genere Oratorum. Topica. Vol.2. Rhetorical Treatises. Harvard University Press, 2008. Kappel, G., Proll, B., Seiegfried, R., & Retschitzegger, W. (eds) (2003). Web Engineering. The Discipline of Systematic Development of Web Applications. Heidelberg, Germany: John Wiley and Sons.
Krug, S. (2005). Don’t make me think. New Riders. Laudon, K.C. & Laudon, J.P. (2013). Management information systems. 11/ED Prentice Hall. Mich, L. (2010). Towards a Web 2.0 Presence Model for Tourism Destination Management Organizations. In Proceeding eChallenges e-2010, Dublin: IIMC International Information Management Corporation Ltd ( pp. 1-8). Mich, L., Franch, M., & Gaio, L. (2003). Evaluating and Designing Web Site Quality. Multimedia, 10(1), 34-43. O'Reilly T. (2005). What is Web 2.0? Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software (online at http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html). Pressman, R. S. & Lowe, D. (2008). Web Engineering: a practitioner’s approach. New York: McGraw-Hill. Parasuraman A, Zeithaml VA, Berry LL. A Conceptual Model of Service Quality and Its Implications for Future Research. The Journal of Marketing, 1985; 49(4):41-50. Tapscott, D., & Williams, A.D. (2006). Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. Penguin, US. Timmers, P. (1998). Business Models for Electronic Markets. Journal on Electronic Markets, 8(2), 3-8. Zeldman, J. (2009). Designing with Web Standards, 3rd ed. Berkeley, CA: New Riders. Website Links • • • • •
Alexa - www.alexa.org eTourism – resources for website quality evaluation: http://etourism.economia.unitn.it Nielsen Jacob: www.useit.com W3C - The World Wide Web Consorzio: www.w3.org WAI – Web Accessibility Initiative: www.w3.org/WAI
