European tourist destinations on the internet search engines

Abstract

This paper examines the accessibility and visibility of tourist destinations in a search engine as an opportunity to influence destination competitiveness. The study employed a research design that simulates a traveller's use of four search engines for travel planning by using the concept "tourism" and a set of pre-defined keywords in combination with European tourist destination names. The results of this research reveal that search engines index a great number of websites related to tourism, although the visibility of tourist destinations is extremely low. © 2012 International University College. All rights reserved.