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Measuring the Twitter Performance of Hotel E-Mediaries

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Tourism, Culture and Heritage in a Smart Economy

Abstract

ICT, use of web and web 2.0 applications have deeply affected the way travel and tourism organizations distribute up-to-date content and their products in the marketplace. Traditional intermediaries, like travel agents, tour operators or even the Global Distribution Systems are progressively disappearing. Consumers undertake their entire tourism product search and booking on-line and therefore a wide range of new tourism e-Mediaries emerge, like single supplier provisions, web-based travel agencies, portals and hotel booking websites. Twitter allow hotel e-Mediaries to spread information and deals, to listen to customers, increase customer engagement, enhance customer satisfaction and obtain deeper insight into the customers’ experiences. Up to now, no research has been devoted at investigating the use of Twitter by hotel e-Mediaries. The paper fills this gap and records major hotel e-Mediaries websites and their Twitter accounts. Twitter performance indexes are used to describe the activity and performance of these accounts. Statistical analysis investigates if significant differentiations among hotel booking websites exists, regarding Twitter performance. It is investigated whether Twitter performance is in accordance with hotel booking websites’ web traffic data and analytics.

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Correspondence to Kostas Zafiropoulos .

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Vrana, V., Zafiropoulos, K., Antoniadis, K., Theocharidis, AI. (2017). Measuring the Twitter Performance of Hotel E-Mediaries. In: Katsoni, V., Upadhya, A., Stratigea, A. (eds) Tourism, Culture and Heritage in a Smart Economy . Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47732-9_8

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