Teenagers’ destination website navigation. A comparison among eye-tracking, web analytics, and self-declared investigation

Abstract

The aim of this study is to verify if teenagers’ actual navigation through webpages match with their self-declared preferences (in terms of tourist attractions), and if these preferences are in line with the official DMO data about most viewed pages. Particularly, self-declared attractions are confronted with the contents visualized during navigation, thus making possible to understand to what extent the exposure to certain themes influence preferences towards certain attractions. Results from this comparison suggest that contents that teenagers pay attention to during navigation are not always what they declare to prefer as tourist attraction. In a second stage, a comparison with the official DMO data showing the most viewed pages is carried out in order to verify if there are any commonalities in terms of preferred attractions. Results show commonalities in terms of preferences: outdoor/sports and events/concerts are the preferred themes across all sources. But results also show discrepancies. In fact, at the same time, according to each type of approach used, the ranking of preferred themes changes. Therefore, results suggests that a multi-source approach helps to eliminate possible biases that may occur if only one approach is adopted.