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In the context of integrated promotion, it is essential to promote destination images consistently across multiple digital channels. This study aims to examine the consistency of online destination images projected through the official tourism websites and the Instagram accounts of five main destinations in Southeast Asia.

Previous studies have used correspondence analyses to measure the relationship between categorical variables. In the present study, a Spearman’s rank-order correlation was performed after the correspondence analyses to cross-check the results.

Destinations in Southeast Asia tend to project images that are similar to each other. The correspondence analyses and Spearman’s correlation found that only one country in the area projected relatively consistent destination images. By contrast, the other destinations tend to promote inconsistent images through their official websites and Instagram accounts.

Previous studies have assessed the consistency of projected destination image by comparing communication channels managed by government/public organisations with channels of private sector organisations. This was achieved by comparing printed materials with digital channels. By contrast, this study highlights the importance of assessing a destination’s online projected image consistency across different digital platforms (official tourism websites and official Instagram accounts) within the perspective of integrated promotion.

The purpose of this study is to report the findings of a benchmarking exercise among official tourism websites of five Southeast Asian countries. website benchmarking, namely, a strategy used to evaluate and compare website quality, has been widely used within the context of tourism studies. Yet there is a relative lack of information concerning best practices for official tourism websites as a form of promoting rural tourism and sustainability.

By using a qualitative approach, a group of six tourism researchers were invited to evaluate official tourism websites of Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines for user-friendliness, site attractiveness, marketing attractiveness and provision of information on rural tourism and sustainability.

Overall, the evaluations provided by the researchers indicated that in general, the Indonesian and Malaysian websites were always perceived as the best options compared to the Thai, Philippine and Vietnamese online platforms, mainly due to their visual appeal. However, this study also highlighted that the information about rural tourism products in all the websites evaluated was regarded as being very limited. Furthermore, the variety and diversity of respondents’ opinions showed that subjective components played a role in the interpretation of the websites.

Based on the findings of this study, three main recommendations have been suggested to assist tourism websites’ designers to design more impactful websites.

The novelty of this study lies in the consideration of websites as interactional and dialectical narratives whose meanings are produced, negotiated or challenged by the users.

The nuclear purpose of this research paper is to analyse representative bridges around the world as a tourist attraction and iconic element through destination marketing organisations’ (DMOs’) tourism official websites where these are localised and three online travel agencies’ (OTAs’) websites.

This research used a mixed method. The author carried out Google research (13 March 2023) that included the following search word string “iconic bridges around the world” and “the most famous bridges worldwide” to select the most relevant bridges around the globe. Moreover, this research used a content analysis to examine how Expedia, Booking and Orbitz OTAs promote the bridges through their websites in terms of a tourist attraction, iconic element, tourist package, images and information.

Findings suggest that the most representative bridges analysed in this study are promoted as iconic element and tourist attraction through DMOs’ websites. Nevertheless, Booking, Expedia and Orbitz OTAs promote and sell products and services related to bridges selected, except in the case of the Millau Viaduct in France, the Si-O-Se-Pol bridge in Iran, the Danyang Kunshan Grand bridge in China and the Royal Gorge in the USA. Furthermore, results support that OTAs need to enhance the quality and variety of products and services that are linked to iconic bridges sightseeing tours because at the moment, there is a great uniformity in the promotion of products and services provided.

This paper contributes to broader debates in the importance of bridges as a tourist attraction and iconic element to attract tourists through tourism promotion websites.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the US states and territories’ official tourism information websites based on the Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) and Section 508 guidelines to identify the compliance of websites towards disabilities policies and their behaviour pattern.

The official tourism websites of 57 states and territories were analysed through the TAW tool for WCAG 2.0 and AChecker for Section 508. Cluster analysis was used to produce a group of websites underlying the accessibility issues obtained from the online tool to understand the common pattern of behaviour.

The result revealed that websites have serious and significant accessibility issues underlying the prescribed guidelines that would interfere with the use of the website by disabled people. The main issues that make the website least accessible focussed on the following guideline of WCAG 2.0: compatible, navigable, text alternative, distinguishable and adaptable.

The empirical results provide the US states and territories’ tourism authority to better understand web accessibility in their websites and its impact on disabled people.

As the web plays an important role in individual lives, this study highlights the accessibility issues which need immediately focussed and technically planned actions from the respective states and territories to ensure that designed web content should communicate effectively and universally.

Reviews of scientific publications in the area of tourism continuously find commonalities and repeatedly applied criteria in conceptualizing destination image. Much emphasis has been placed on investigating the image components (dimensions) and potential impacts as perceived by the consumer. Publications on the image formation and change, however, do not disclose many details on the process and impacts of change agents. Hence, this study aims to look into the initial stages of destination image planning and how these plans are implemented through projecting onto the official destination websites.

The text-based content analysis builds on a random sample of one-third of the tourism development plans and the respective official tourism websites of sub-provincial prefectures in China. Terms (originally phrased in Chinese language only) were extracted that could be classified as image components considering the context where they appeared.

Results exhibit a sparse application of varied and imaginative image elements in both the tourism development plans and the official websites. Deviations between intended and projected destinations are substantial. An overwhelming majority of prefectural destination management organizations (DMOs) appears to be distant from a professional implementation of an image positioning strategy.

Due to resource limitations, only a random sample of one-third of the 365 sub-provincial prefectures in China could have been screened. To draw a complete, though structurally most probably not very different, picture on the scope and variety of image elements, a complete investigation would be necessary. The projection of image items on the official websites represents a restricted view on possible image formation agents. For a more comprehensive understanding, other information channels (e.g. printed advertising material, travel catalogues and guide books) would complement the perspective on induced image agents.

From a managerial perspective, it appears to be an easy job to position a destination along one or two main appeal characteristics, particularly when the majority of these are factual aspects of geography, landscape, history or culture. Whether such a positioning strategy materializes in view of an increasing competition among destinations is questionable. The condensed image profiles identified in this study can act as blueprints for developing more pronounced positioning profiles. The variation across groups of destination image profiles and the composition of prefectures for each group reflects the potential competitive pressure that prefectures may excel unless the DMO representatives decide to go for an adapted target position.

This study is a rare attempt to analyse the intended/planned and projected image elements of a multitude of tourism destinations simultaneously. Such a comparison is usually done on a case-by-case basis only. Thus, the insights of this study go beyond the limits of an individual destination enabling structural comparisons across neighbouring and nation-wide regions.

This chapter reports on how to assess the usefulness of official tourism websites; the study applies for information audit rubrics to assess the marketing websites for three cities in the state of California. The study provides tools that may be useful for designing destination websites to include information that visitors find useful. The three focal cities include Los Angeles (discoverlosangeles.com), San Diego (sandiego.org), and San Francisco (onlyinsanfrancisco.com). One of the hypotheses that the study examines is that destination websites are assessable in order of good, better, best. Findings: San Francisco provides the most useful information and is likely to be the most successful official tourism website. The assessment of San Francisco as the best website is the outcome of applying macro and micro rubrics covering: general and practical information, ability to book a vacation, digital and print materials, use of media components, and partnerships.

Culture is an important motivation force to people within the context of tourism. It provides new opportunities for destinations to promote cultural elements and attract more travellers. This study aims to investigate how the cultural heritage of Cyprus is promoted online and to identify whether the needs of travellers who focus on experiential aspects and prioritise culture can be fulfilled.

The research aim is fulfilled through a critical discourse analysis of selected WebPages concerning representation of the culture of Cyprus within the tourism context.

Eighteen websites were included, and the results suggest that Cyprus has Web exposure specifically promoting its cultural heritage. However, the websites have been established with different tourism scopes, with culture comprising just one part of the content. Thus, the development of specialised websites is dedicated exclusively to culture and tourism, and it seems appropriate to attract travellers interested in more educational activities with cultural and historical value. This approach would bring many benefits because this cohort of travellers is in an upper-scale tourist market.

This study is original in nature because it brings together the case of Cyprus, an island destination highly depended on tourism in relation to cultural tourism Web discourse. The promotion of cultural parameters will provide more opportunities for the island and escape from the 3S’s (sea, sun and sand) image to be positioned as a culturally sustainable destination.

The present research extends the existing literature of halal tourism and Muslims’ travel decision-making by applying information-seeking models and the planned behavior theory to identify the process of decision-making to travel to non-Islamic destinations. This study aims to identify the views of Muslim travelers who traveled before to non-Islamic destinations to evaluate their information search experience and how their travel decision is formed.

Semi-structured interviews are conducted with a sample of Muslim travelers who visited a non-Islamic destination during the past five years. Data saturation resulted in 17 interviewees from different Islamic destinations, namely, Egypt, Morocco, Sudan and Pakistan.

Muslim interviewees indicate the relative importance of reference groups compared to the government websites as a source of information. This study concludes some remarkable results regarding the importance of some halal marketing strategies such as halal searchability and availability, halal certification and appraisal, halal at airports and halal hotels. It presents an emergent framework that shows the factors affecting visiting a non-Islamic destination regarding halal issues for Muslim travelers.

It provides destinations’ official tourism managers with various strategies to brand their destinations as Muslim-friendly destinations.

Investigating the process of decision-making of traveling to non-Islamic destinations from Muslim travelers’ perspective is limited. Examining the role of information-seeking behavior in Muslim travelers’ decision-making is scarce.

The purpose of this article is to propose and test empirically tourism ' s destination dominance and marketing website usefulness hypothesis (TDDH). The study proposes a multi-item metric for marketing website usefulness. The main hypothesis is that the usefulness of a destination ' s marketing website associates positively with the dominance of tourism in the destination.

The following ratio defines tourism ' s destination dominance: the number of tourists visiting annually to a destination ' s residential population. The method includes creating a multi-item metric for judging the usefulness of a destination ' s marketing website. The study applies the metric in evaluating the usefulness of 40 destination marketing websites.

The study ' s findings indicate a significant relationship between tourism destination dominance and marketing website usefulness. The effect size of this relationship is small. The small effect size indicates that some destinations with relatively few tourists (relative to the destination ' s residential population) do include substantial amounts of information in their websites and some destinations with relatively many tourists do not do so.

The usefulness of a destination ' s website for potential visitors does not relate substantially to tourism ' s dominance in the destination. Some destinations with relatively few tourists are highly competent in designing websites that are highly useful for potential visitors.

Providing a discussion of alternative tourism destination dominance metrics, confirming the view that destination marketing websites vary in their usefulness for potential visitors and offering a metric for testing usefulness are the valuable contributions of the study.

For sustainable progress of heritage tourism in Muslim regions, exaggerated and distorted notions of Islam have to be dispelled. To accomplish such an arduous task, the first step is to examine media content employed by key tourism organizations/agencies in Muslim countries. This chapter examines the heritage environments and contemporary macro environment factors in Muslim countries that are either secular or Islamic in nature. Using cultural indicators, it further analyzes the content of website marketing employed by the leading tourism authorities in the selected regions to understand if considerations and efforts are made to market Muslim heritage. The findings indicate mixed results.