Assessing and benchmarking digital presence in destination management of local governmental organizations in Crete and in South Aegean in Greece.

Abstract

Destination Management Organizations’ websites are very important tools since they allow direct communication with the traveler worldwide and provide information at every step of the “customer journey”. Complementary to websites, presence in Social Media Platforms, enhances interactive communication with tourists, enables usage of user-generated content and helps better understanding what are the travelers’ perception about the destination.

We use a model to evaluate the quality and digital presence of two Greek regions, namely Crete and South Aegean. The model was properly adjusted for a single evaluator to grade local governmental destination websites. In addition, a reputable online tool was used to evaluate their pages or profiles on Social Media Platforms to formulate a complete picture of their digital presence in destination management.

In both Crete and South Aegean regions, the majority of websites dedicated to destination promotion received nearly half of the excellent grade; the empirical evidence indicated that YouTube was the best utilized platform (over 65% of channels received a B- to C- rating). Almost 35% of FB pages got B-, the highest grade for Instagram profiles was C+ (close to 55% of the profiles), and for Twitter profiles, it was C (20% of them).