Information Convergence in the Long Tail: The Case of Tourism Destination Information

The information market around a given tourism destination is explored and the characteristics and quality of the available websites are investigated, underlines the importance of consumer generated content and its strategic role for the promotion.

Abstract

Tourism information on the Internet is spreading through a wide range of different websites. In addition to the official destination or attraction websites, many are unofficial websites such as blogs, wiki, social networks, which offer destination information. Hence official websites, being destination or attraction sites, are challenged by unofficial ones. Actually these two different types of websites often diffuse similar content in terms of topics and subjects but in different forms. This study explores the information market around a given tourism destination and investigates the characteristics and quality of the available websites. It underlines the importance of consumer generated content and its strategic role for the promotion. Finally, several ways of exploiting the official and unofficial contents are explored and the topic of the possible information convergence, thanks to folksonomies, is discussed.