Internet Marketing in Tourism in Asia: An Evaluation of the Performance of East Asian National Tourism Organization Websites

ABSTRACT

Despite the increasing importance of the Internet as a marketing tool among national tourism organizations (NTOs) and the importance of tourism in the East Asia region, relatively few studies have been done on measuring the marketing effectiveness of NTO Websites and this exploratory study was designed to fill this gap. It included an extensive content analysis to compare NTO Websites in the East Asia region and identify their Internet marketing strengths and weaknesses. The results indicated that all of the NTOs in the East Asia region were not fully utilizing their Websites. In particular, among the four groups of criteria evaluated, it was found that East Asian NTOs were not very effective in using their Websites in the marketing role. The results of the study delivered a significant message for the NTOs in East Asia.

KEYWORDS:

• National tourism organizations
• NTOs
• Internet marketing
• Website evaluation
• Balanced Scorecard
• East Asia