Information, Experience and Destination Marketing - The Influence of Interactivity on Tourism Website

This study focuses on the tourism websites that are doing destination marketing for some remote areas. This study proposes that when interactivity is put into the website to create users' virtue experience with the remote areas, different user may response differently. Two kinds of user's personal factors are investigated in this study: Susceptibility to Interpersonal Influence and Personal Involvement. The research findings support the ideas proposed by Vogt et al. that values sought by information searchers are not limited to functional needs but include hedonic, innovative, aesthetic, and sign needs. The findings also indicate that interactivity feature can generate better intention to visit on users with higher personal involvement on the tour, or lower susceptibility to interpersonal influence. While on traditional tourism website, these two factors (personal involvement and susceptibility to interpersonal influence) have no significant impact on users' satisfaction. Based on these findings, marketers and advertisers can design more effective tourism website for various potential visitors to enhance their intention to visit the destination.