Social computing in tourism websites

Abstract

The rapid growth of user-generated content on the Internet represents a great potential in deploying social computing tools to enrich communication and collaboration among different stakeholders in the tourism industry. The purpose of this paper is to address two research questions pertaining to tourism websites: (1) how prevalently are social computing tools used? (2) In what ways have social computing tools been used? A total of 90 tourism-related websites was randomly drawn from Asia, American and Europe for analysis. The findings reveal that the order of prevalence among the different social computing tools is as follows: social tagging services, blogs, mashup, RSS and multimedia sharing services. This paper examines the use of various social computing tools and concludes with three limitations as well as recommendations for further research.