Impact of Social Media and Proprietary Media on Potential Tourists Holiday Planning Process. The Case of National Tourism Organizations

Social media have established themselves as the prominent tool enabling touristic destinations, National Tourism Organizations and online travel agencies to influence the choices of potential tourists as well as their daily travel schedule on site. This paradigm shift is complemented by user generated content which is also considered to be extremely influential albeit not always reliable and has created a monstrosity of available data both in depth and scope on the supply and demand side of the touristic business. Notwithstanding the availability of this repository of big data, the answer to the question of what is the preference and the attached perceived significance of using specific social media platforms and National Tourism Organization proprietary media still remains vague. We thus investigate the nature of the usage of social media platforms and its perceived importance reaching the conclusion that although potential tourists seem to prefer the official touristic marketing portals of NTO's they simultaneously perceive the content as less useful than that of other social media platforms. This implies that NTO's must update their marketing portals more often and possibly rely more on intermediate thematically focused microsites which can link to their main marketing portals.