Participación de los principales destinos turísticos europeos en buscadores: aplicación al ámbito español

Abstract

Online visibility and accessibility is a challenge for tourist organizations and destinations. Potential tourists should be able to plan their journeys and completely satisfy their travel needs using online search engines and the websites of destinations. The accessibility and visibility of tourist destinations and organizations in a search engine are a great opportunity to promote and market both organizations and destinations, and many have a decisive influence on competitiveness. This article therefore aims to determine how four online search engines present the concept �tourism� in the most famous European tourist destinations. This study divides the concept of tourism into nine tourist categories which are used to analyze how tourism is represented in the main Spanish tourist destinations. The results of this research reveal that search engines index a great number of websites related to tourism, although the visibility and accessibility of tourist destinations for tourists is relatively low. The low visibility of tourist websites in the search engines used here suggests that the possibility of online interaction between tourists and tourist organizations and destinations is small. Results also indicate that tourist organizations and destinations should increase their presence in as many online search engines as possible. Tourist destinations should also take actions contributing to increase the visibility of their websites in the results found by search engines, so that potential tourists may satisfy their travel needs completely.