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Online Reputation and Tourism Destination Competitiveness—Conceptual Model Development and Pilot Testing

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Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2017

Abstract

Travellers use social media in all phases of travel planning. Previous research confirmed that people trust online reviews more than other sources of information. Building good online reputation is necessary for tourist destinations in order to be competitive. The purpose of this study is to provide a conceptual model for measuring the relationship between online reputation and tourism destination competitiveness and to present the results of the pilot study. The main objective of this study is to validate the studied constructs, the related questions and used scales. Descriptive statistics and reliability analysis were performed on a sample of 130 respondents. The total Cronbach’s alpha was 0.915 indicating a very high degree of internal consistency. The paper contributes to the existing literature by providing theoretical evidence of the relationship between online reputation and tourism destination competitiveness and testing existing measurement scales on small tourism destination.

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Acknowledgements

This paper is the result of the scientific project “Measuring online reputation impact on tourism destination competitiveness” which is supported by the University of Rijeka (project no. ZP UNIRI 2/15).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Tourism and Hospitality Management, University of Rijeka, Rijeka, Croatia

    Jelena Dorcic & Jelena Komsic

Authors
  1. Jelena Dorcic
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  2. Jelena Komsic
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Correspondence to Jelena Dorcic .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Tourism, HES-SO Valais-Wallis, Sierre, Valais, Switzerland

    Roland Schegg

  2. School of Hospitality and Tourism Management, University of Surrey, Guildford, United Kingdom

    Brigitte Stangl

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Dorcic, J., Komsic, J. (2017). Online Reputation and Tourism Destination Competitiveness—Conceptual Model Development and Pilot Testing. In: Schegg, R., Stangl, B. (eds) Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2017. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51168-9_39

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