Destinations' Information Competition and Web Reputation

Destination managers are investing considerable effort (i.e., time, resources, and money) to market their destinations on the Internet. In addition to official destination websites, many unofficial websites are populating the results pages of search engines, diffusing almost the same contents as official destinations websites. The aim of this study is to investigate the information market available to the traveler searching for destination-related information in the so-called online tourism space. Search engines are indexing not only official websites, but also any other websites such as blogs, review websites, wikis, reviews, etc., which are available online. Starting from a log file analysis for a given destination, a set of nine keywords was used to perform search activities on two major search engines (Google and Yahoo!). Search results were first organized and described in order to describe the destinations’ information competitors. Second, a content analysis study was performed in order to examine topics and arguments of the retrieved results that are shaping the Web reputation of destinations. The article shows that unofficial sources of information are equally important with respect to officially provided information. Hence, destinations need to manage their brand and online reputation holistically by attempting to coordinate the players offering information about themselves and also amalgamating the entire range of information and service providers on platforms of experience creation.