engleski

Top Hotels and Tourist Campsites’ Web Sites and Social Networks

The importance of tourism industry in Croatian GDP, in spite of crises, continues to grow, as well as the importance of this sector in the world economy. Internet technology has an important influence in changing some of the key industry premises. Tourism industry represents one of the areas in which customer expectations are carefully traced and followed. The clients’ widespread smart phone and tablet computer usage changes significantly their expectations and forces hotels and tourist campsites’ Web sites to accept new client requests and expectations. The age structure of clients and market trends on European emissive markets show mobile technologies usage growth. Hotels and tourist campsites’ Web sites discover social networks’ potential not only as a new opportunity for communication with potential customers in presale process, but in constant exchange of information. Smart phones and tablets enable clients to constantly trace new offerings in tourist destination and exchange their experiences. Social networks in this sense provide an important channel for dissemination of more objective and individual information. Customer preferences and characteristics significantly differ between hotel and tourist campsite guests. Thus, the importance of information from an individual experience is bigger for tourist campsite guests as they are much more sensitive about environment and tourist campsite infrastructure information. This kind of information is usually poorly supported by tourist campsites’ Web sites, so the experience of previous guests is very important. This paper compares top hotel and top tourist campsites’ Web sites in Istria, the leading Croatian tourist region, and the Web sites of several top hotels and tourist campsites throughout the Europe. The focus of this paper is on social networks as a key channel for clients’ individual experience sharing. Analysis of results shows that hotels accept new technology trends, such as social networks, much faster than tourist campsites.

hotel ; tourist campsite ; Web site ; social network ; mobile technology

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