Invisible Power of Culture: Mapping Tourist Information Flow of National DMO websites

Abstract

Destination Marketing Organization (DMO) websites serve as hubs for disseminating information to tourists and communicating with destination stakeholders via a system of hyperlinks. These websites and their hyperlink structures potentially reflect cultural variations among societies and, therefore, differ in what tourists from other cultures might expect in terms of the information search process, affecting early impressions about the destination. The study compares the hyperlink structure of official DMO websites of South Korea, the United States, and Germany and examines whether the ways of organizing and distributing tourist information are reflective of cultural variations. The collected data were examined using the blockmodeling technique. The main differences among the three networks were found in structural properties and the ways tourist information was distributed. Cultural dimensions can explicate the different patterns of information flow. The findings contribute to the literature on how hyperlinked information can be leveraged to the benefit of tourists.