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Numerous travel websites have become popular in the past decade. Some destination websites allow travelers to book flights, hotels, restaurant visits, and tours. They also provide a great way for other tourists to leave feedback on the visits they had to specific travel destinations and provide other customers with reliable accounts. In this case, the theory proposes that unique offerings on a website have a greater affect on getting website visitors who are potential tourists to actually visit the website's destination. The findings show that interactive tourism websites that keep up with current technology will translate into attracting the most visitors to that specific city location. This study is unique and valuable as the analysis of the three tourism websites indicates the uniqueness of each of the three specific cities located on the Mediterranean Sea: Valencia, Marseille, and Genoa. This study provides a detailed analysis of each of the three cities’ travel websites and ranks each of the websites to evaluate which is the most reliable and most appealing to today's busy travelers. Valencia's tourism website earns “Best” of the three tourism destination websites. Marseille and Genoa's website do not offer the same caliber of information and lack the detail of Valencia's website. Valencia's website is easy to use, has the most up-to-date technology sources, and is physically the most appealing.

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 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.

This study aims to review published articles on website evaluation in hospitality and tourism for the period of 2000-2015 to provide a comprehensive updated review, as well as to offer implications for academic researchers and industry practitioners.

Content analysis was adopted by this study to review retrieved articles on website evaluation in hospitality and tourism. Articles were then analyzed from consumers’ perspective, suppliers’ perspective, and both consumers and suppliers’ perspectives using a systematic approach.

Major findings of this study showed that a majority of articles focused on either hospitality or tourism. Moreover, most of the articles generally discussed user interface, marketing effectiveness and website quality. However, these articles did not discuss in detail the implications of website evaluation and ignore the connections between suppliers and consumers to some extent.

This study can be used as a reference for academic researchers to extend previous frameworks and for industry practitioners to reconstruct the traditional organizational chart and implementing e-strategic management strategies, including m-marketing.

This study updates website evaluation development in hospitality and tourism in the new millennium. The findings of this study provide significant implications for hospitality and tourism researchers and practitioners to encourage supplier-consumer engagement.

The purpose of this paper is to define and analyse not only the main categories of online marketing strategies used by Rioja wine producers but also how wineries use their websites to provide information about wine tourism.

The content of websites corresponding to the Rioja designation of origin (Spain) is analysed, and the types of websites are determined according to significant differences in their content.

The websites used by Rioja wineries can be improved. The elements developed the best are those related to contact information and interactive communication, although interactive communication can also be enhanced through properly managed social networks. The study concludes that the websites can be further improved by including more information about the wines of the wineries, by improving their e-commerce platforms and interactivity and by including more information about other companies at the wine tourism destination. Two distinct types of websites were observed, differentiated by greater or lesser orientation towards the development of the region as a wine tourism destination.

This study should be conducted for other designations of origin, both national and international, thereby allowing a comparison of not only the elements that are present on websites but also their orientation.

An outline is provided regarding the information that a winery's website must have to generate interest in a region as a wine tourism destination. The indicators that must be developed for a region to be tourism oriented are shown.

The study highlights the importance of including wine tourism information on websites to improve social cohesion among wine tourism players and to contribute to both a stronger wine tourism identity and improved economic outcomes.

The proposed scheme is a diagnostic tool that allows determining the areas of improvement of one of the main sources of information used by tourists when selecting a destination. This tool can be applied by any winery regardless of its location.

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.

Customers who engage in impulsive online shopping make immediate, unplanned and ill-thought-out purchases online. The purpose of this paper is to present a model to illustrate how website quality (moderated by hedonic value) influences impulsive shopping behaviors in the context of online tourism.

The model and hypotheses presented here were tested by structural equation modeling. Empirical data were collected by conducting a questionnaire survey, in total, 3,000 invitation messages were mailed to the members of the two travel communities (1,500 invitation messages for each one), of which, 402 were returned completed (a return rate of 13.4 percent).

Visually appealing websites are more likely to attract customer attention and illicit pleasurable emotional responses. In addition, effective tourism websites also maintain good service quality and ensure accuracy of information. Finally, good functional benefits can help customers reduce the time and effort spent searching for a specific service and can also serve as a stimulus triggering impulse buying.

This study used a reliable multidimensional measure of factors that influence the relational benefit of initiators and buyers to help elucidate which factors encourage impulsive online shopping. From a theoretical perspective, the authors determined that website quality is positively associated with functional benefits, and thereby influences impulsive shopping behaviors; in addition, the functional benefits conferred by websites have a strong and direct influence on impulsive shopping behavior. However, this effect is moderated by hedonic value.

Online tourism retailers should continually seek to enhance this function because it is the primary motivation behind customer use of online shopping websites. Effective tourism websites also maintain good service quality and ensure accuracy of information. Finally, navigation systems should be designed to meet the needs of new users, for example by offering help pages that address a variety of topics. Therefore, tourism websites should feature an adequate number of images, a colorful design, and well-described services and products.

In recent years, the popularity of online shopping websites has continued to rise. In seeking to elucidate impulsive online shopping behaviors, this study focused on online-to-offline applications, the uses-and-gratifications perspective and service-dominant logic. The authors also discussed the important influence of website quality on impulse buying and how this is moderated by hedonic value. The research model presented in this study provides a reliable instrument to operationalize key constructs in the analysis of impulsive shopping behavior and has important implications for the online tourism industry.

Given the increased importance of food in tourists’ travel experience, the purpose of this paper is to explore the current and future potential of local food and foodways in marketing Egyptian destinations online.

The content of 20 Egyptian destination marketing organization (DMO) websites was subject to a content analysis. A checklist was developed based on literature analysis. The frequencies of information related to food culture and cuisine marketing were tallied, followed by a qualitative assessment of contents from the various websites. The results were further discussed with DMO representatives to provide contextualized insights as to the future potential of utilizing local food and food tourism initiatives as a component of DMOs website marketing in Egypt.

The study noted some initial efforts for Egyptian DMO websites to market food culture and gastronomic practices; however, the results suggest that the usage of food culture on Egyptian DMOs websites is still in its infancy. The study also highlights the challenges that need to be tackled as well as the resources required for food tourism development.

This study illustrates the need and potential capacity of Egyptian DMO websites to market food culture and local cuisines (including traditional foods and table manners). These results are expected to help Egyptian DMOs to strategically embrace local cuisine and food culture as a vehicle for destination marketing.

This case study provides insights for African and other developing economies in their destination marketing. The proposed framework and guidelines are intended to potentially serve as a framework for destination marketers and entrepreneurs to optimize the tourism potential of food culture.

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.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the promotion of the Mediterranean areas over the Internet. To meet this objective, the tourism board of each country is identified and Website indicators based on the assessment of seven “best practices” (WTO 1999) and e‐business for tourism strategies (WTO 2001) are analyzed. Content analysis reveals differences among countries. Managerial implications are developed.