Digital Tourism: A Content Analysis of West Java Tourism Websites

Abstract

Digital tourism is one of three strategic priorities from Ministry of Tourism to increase the number of tourist who visiting Indonesia. Tourism industry is one of the successful sector using Internet media to share destination images, where the tourism websites becomes a very useful tool to promote tourism by giving important informations for visitors. This study explore the effectiveness of official tourism websites in West Java province, Indonesia. Content analysis method, consist of three dimension: Aesthetic (destination visualisation, websites design); Informative (uniqueness, monetery value, and cultural promotion); Interactive (e-travel planner, online communities) were used to asses 29 official cities and regency's tourism websites. The results presented within this paper showed that West Java tourism websites were found to be generally fair in one dimension but lacked to attracted visitors. Based on the result findings, it is recommended that the official tourism organisations should evolve their websites as the marketing tools and the most important for delivering positive images of the destination online. These research give implications for the local tourism websites administrator to improve the website's content and also further research in tourism websites evaluation.