Tourism: an offline/online perspective

Abstract: Before the birth of the Internet, tourist destinations have reached their
customers with traditional marketing activities and via travel agencies.
Today these activities can be carried out through the Internet. It is
therefore important for tourist destinations to mix their traditional
offline activities with the online opportunities that have occurred. The
purpose with this study is to provide a better understanding on how offline
tourist destinations use the Internet to create a better total travel
experience for tourists. To reach this purpose, two research questions have
been stated, focusing on how the online tourism experience can be
described, as well as the offline experience. Literature was reviewed based
on these research questions, resulting in a conceptual framework. In order
to test this framework, a qualitative, case study methodology was employed,
focusing on two companies in the tourism business. Through interviews with
the companies, as well as direct observations/interaction with their
websites, the findings indicate that a website is an important tool in the
tourism business, primarily for reaching out with information. It is
important to build the website in an effective way, where the structure and
web design offer the users fast and easy access to the information they are
looking for regarding the offline experience they seek.