engleski

Hotels and camps’ Web sites in Istria and social networks

The growing importance of tourism industry in world economy reflects on tourism growing importance in Croatian economy as well. Tourism industry represents one of the areas in which Internet technology has a significant influence in changing some of the key industry premises. Hotels and camps’ websites offer new opportunities for communication with potential customers. Besides classic promotional flavor of information usually placed on hotels and camps’ Web portals, social networks provide an important channel for dissemination of more objective and individual information. Customer preferences and characteristics significantly differ between hotel and camp guests. Thus, the importance of information from an individual experience is bigger for camp guests as they are much more sensitive about environment and camp infrastructure information. This kind of information is usually poorly supported by camp Web sites, so the experience of previous guests is very important. This paper compares hotel and camp web sites with the focus on social networks as a key channel of individual experience sharing. Results show that hotels’ Web sites have more facility information, and lack of destination information, as well as a weak presence on social networks. Camps’ Web sites offer much more destination information and are better connected through social networks, but still these features could be improved further, in order to enhance their customers’ satisfaction.

tourism; hotel web sites quality; camp; social network; Istria

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