Mapping the Web Presences of Tourism Destinations: An Analysis of the European Countries

Abstract

Planning a comprehensive Web presence for a tourism destination is becoming more and more challenging. Beside traditional websites, tourism destinations have to define their presences on social network websites. Trends in tourist behaviours in respect of these networks show the importance of tourism destinations presences on them. However the fast evolution of the technological and cultural context makes it difficult to identity best practices to support destination management organizations in their analysis and decisions. In this paper we propose to map official and semi-official presences of a tourism destination using graphs which nodes correspond to different online 'spaces', and links to connections among them. Parameters of different kinds are used to describe the performances of the spaces. To illustrate the application of the modelling technique we report results of a study conducted on the Web presence of the European countries as tourism destinations