Towards a Tourism Destination Reputation Model. A first step

Tourism destinations are complex organizations which need to manage their organizational reputation. Moreover, being the web a very relevant communication, marketing and sales channel, tourism managers should be aware that also online discourse can influence the overall reputation of the destination. Actually the ever increasing complexity and evolution of the web and the advent of web2.0 made possible the sharing of experiences by tourists, creating a network of digitalized word-of-mouth, leading to the creation of the online repuatation. Thus, reputation could be used as a construct to study not only what tourists think about a given destination but also the aggregation of online feedbacks leading to online reputation. This paper focuses on a preliminary step in this direction: the creation of a Destination Reputation Model, based on the RepTrak (reputationinstitute.com) model.