Karl Wöber

Tourism Destination Competitiveness: From Definition to Explanation?

This article contributes to the recent literature on tourism destination competitiveness including the gargantuan compilations of competitiveness factors by Ritchie and Crouch (2003), or Dwyer and Kim (2003), and, particularly, the widely known prototype of a Competitiveness Monitor (CM) initiated by the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC). The central question underlying this article is whether an arrangement of data such as the CM can be transformed from a purely definitional system into an explanatory model. A number of criticisms regarding the way of constructing the CM, its epistemological nature, and the absence of any accessibility factors lead to a moderately revised system that is explored by latent variable modeling. The empirical findings support this type of model, which tends to better explain the levels of tourism activity already achieved than sustained tourism growth. A discussion of the detailed results produces several recommendations on how to adjust the future strategy of research on destination competitiveness.

Representation of the Online Tourism Domain in Search Engines

With the growing importance of the Internet for travel planning, understanding the online domain of tourism is vital in order to identify the challenges and potential solutions for effectively marketing travel destinations. This study focuses attention on understanding the representation of the tourism domain on the Internet. Analyses of search results from a major search engine were conducted in order to assess: 1) the visibility of destination-related information; 2) the visibility of various industry sectors within destinations; and 3) the power structure of websites that represent a specific destination. The results show that although there is a huge amount of information indexed, travelers can only access a tiny fraction of the domain. Also, there are a relatively small number of websites dominating the search results. This study provides a number of important insights into the challenges facing the tourism industry with respect to representing a destination online.

An Integrated Approach to Measure Web Site Effectiveness in the European Hotel Industry

This study employs a novel method of Web content extraction and analysis to investigate the evolving competitive landscape in an important business-to-consumer (B2C) area: travel and tourism. Findings from a comprehensive Web mining endeavor and a supplier survey shed light on the effectiveness of tourism Web sites. Important dimensions of the automated measurement are ease of navigation, interactive elements such as reservation and booking features, volume of textual and graphical information, number of available languages, and the textual diversity of documents. Precise textual information and interactive features are crucial to the success of a hotel Web site, measured in terms of tourists’ awareness, electronic inquiries, and online bookings. The article discusses differences between four European destinations and the implications of benchmarks for Web site management.

DieToRecs: a case-based travel advisory system.

There is a growing number of websites that support a traveller in the selection of travel destinations or travel products (e.g. flight or hotel). Typically, the user is required to input product constraints or preferences, which are matched by the system in an electronic catalogue. Major e-commerce websites dedicated to tourism such as Expedia, Travelocity and TISCover have started to cope with travel planning by incorporating recommender systems, i.e. applications that provide advice to users about products (Schafer et al., 2001). Recommender systems for travel planning try to mimic the interactivity observed in traditional counselling sessions with travel agents (Delgado and Davidson, 2002). The current generation of travel recommender systems focuses on destination selection and does not support the user through a personalized interaction in bundling a tailor-made trip comprising one or more locations to visit, an accommodation and additional attractions (museum, theatre, etc.). The DieToRecs10 system extends current recommender systems by incorporating a human choice model extracted from both the literature and the empirical analysis of the traveller’s behaviour. DieToRecs supports the selection of travel products (e.g. a hotel or a visit to a museum or a climbing school) and building a ‘travel bag’, i.e. a coherent (from the user point of view) bundling of products. DieToRecs also supports multiple decision styles by letting the user ‘enter’ the system through three main ‘doors’: iterative single-item selection, complete travel selection and inspiration-driven selection. The first

Judgemental forecasting support systems in tourism

In an increasingly competitive industry, tourism managers are faced with the necessity of estimating future values of demand in the short term despite the limitations of scarcity, volatility and uncertainty. A convenient and flexible approach such as judgemental forecasting holds promise in addressing the major issues in the field of tourism demand forecasting. This paper presents an innovative approach, which uses the opportunities offered by decision support systems to tackle the main issues associated with judgemental forecasting. A forecasting system that supports collaborative short-term forecasting tasks among tourism managers is offered as a case example.

Acquisition and Relevance of Geotagged Information in Tourism

In the case of tourism applications, it is particularly evident that geography is emerging as a fundamental principle for structuring Web resources. Recent improvements in semantic and geographic Web technology, often referred to as the Geospatial Web, acknowledge the relevance of adding location metadata to existing databases and accessing the vast amounts of information stored in these databases via geospatial services. This paper outlines the acquisition of geospatial context information, describes usage scenarios and real-world applications in the tourism industry, and presents an automated software tool for annotating large collections of Web documents automatically. The quality of this tool is tested based upon Web pages from the Austrian National Tourism Organization. Initial results are encouraging and help define a roadmap for further improving the automated tagging of tourism resources.

A comparative study of information needs of city travelers in Europe.

This article focuses on understanding users’ interests in European cities based on log file analysis of keywords entered by users on www.visiteuropeancities.info. It applies various text analysis steps in order to extract significant patterns from the queries made by the users. Multidimensional scaling (MDS) is used for constructing a map of similarities based on the unaided responses gained from the users’ information requests. Multiple regression analysis between the most frequently used terms entered by the users and the geometrical representation generated by the MDS provides additional insights in the semantics defining competitive differences between 32 city break destinations in Europe. Findings comprise information on cities that can be considered as kindred in regard to the information demanded by the users of the Web portal. As it becomes clear in which areas cities are perceived as similar, this findings can be used by city (tourism) managers in order to revise their communication plan regarding their own city if desired.

Towards a sustainable urban tourism development in Europe

The development of indicators and metrics systems has been identified as being of paramount importance by many tourism boards and international tourism organizations. This article discusses the bottom-up, micro-level approach of TourMIS, which is a platform for exchanging tourism statistics among tourism organizations, for collecting measures of sustainable urban tourism development. The authors provide a synthesis of various frameworks for sustainable tourism indicators for subnational regions and cities, concluding that it is more feasible to analyse existing sustainable tourism indicators than to introduce new measures lacking in direct practical applicability for the organizations. The application of data envelopment analysis (DEA) for benchmarking urban tourism destinations is then demonstrated by assessing measures available in TourMIS. Findings include inefficiency scores that suggest both managerial and political implications. Furthermore, the concept of a virtual reference destination assisting managers and politicians to analyse their destination’s strengths and weaknesses is introduced.

The Management of City Tourism in Europe

Tourism has become a major source of employment, revenue, international awareness and opportunity in European cities. As competition among cities grows for visitors as well as for public and private financial support, the efficiency of management in city tourism organizations becomes increasingly important. This chapter aims to examine the nature of European city tourism organizations in terms of their roles, functions, responsibilities and the services they provide. In this investigation two surveys with identical design were conducted among European city tourism managers in 1995 and 1999. Based upon this data, this study identifies the functions that have changed during the given period of time and assesses relationships between these functions. The findings indicate that the emphasis of European city tourism organizations changed considerably during time in five functional areas: 1) hotel booking service, 2) commerce, 3) conventional information dissemination, 4) advanced information product, and 5) relationship management.

Seasonality in City Tourism: Concepts and Measurements

This chapter intends to provide a conceptual basis to understand the forces shaping demand seasonal fluctuations. The most recent developments of research in this area are proposed as stimulus for discussion on the topic. It also offers an overview of the measurements most widely used to assess seasonality in tourism and proposes a methodology suitable to observe changes of seasonal patterns, illustrated with an empirical example on city tourism destinations.