Development of Technology Training for Destination Marketing Organisations

Abstract

Most DMOs are not familiar with new technologies, and they have not had opportunities to learn about and evaluate dynamically changing technologies. Therefore, this study aims to (a) develop educational content in an effort to provide tourism professionals with basic training in new technologies and (b) discover their opinions about technologies through training programs. As training content, tourism-related technologies were separated into Web-based technologies and hardware-based. In addition to the development of training content, this study examined how familiar tourism professionals in DMOs are with these technologies, the perceived usefulness of such technologies, and the DMOs' willingness to use them after a training program on new tourism technologies. Findings suggest that most tourism professionals were not familiar with these technologies and that YouTube was ranked as the most helpful in their destination marketing, followed by RSS feeds and Google Earth.