Understanding Tourism Information Sources: Textual Communication, Efficiency, and Information Gaps

Abstract

This study compares the contents of different online tourism information sources. In addition to developing a quantitative linguistic framework for comparing heterogeneous tourism information sources, a case study of the city of Barcelona in Chinese sources is presented. To understand the structural characteristics of textual communication, efficiency, and information gaps, this research examines texts not only from the websites of the Barcelona Tourism Office (local DMO) and a set of Mainland Chinese travel agencies, but also from Chinese online travel guidebooks and Chinese travel blogs. The findings reveal that the local DMO website texts are, overall, lower in lexical density and keyword density while higher in entropy. Chinese travel agency texts have lower entropy values while keyword and lexical densities are higher. Travel blogs are the most diverse and richest sources. The results explain the easiness of comprehension as well as the concentration, distribution, and repetition of information among the different sources. The findings also identify descriptive– subjective and procedural–propositional knowledge as the main semantic dimensions that affect the information gaps. Lastly, theoretical and practical contributions are discussed.