Online Services Delivered by NTO Portals: A Cross-Country Examination

Abstract

This study compares the online services currently delivered by the official National Tourism Organizations (NTO) portals of the 25 European Union states, to assess their capability in evolving into powerful marketing communication tools. A conceptual framework that identifies 129 online service quality attributes is developed based on the 2QCV3Q model (Mich et al., 2003) and on four different perspectives: marketing, customer, technical and information for the destination (So and Morrison, 2004). The 25 portals are compared by means of content analysis. Our rankings provide a first time assessment of the NTO online offerings and indicate high variability in their performance. Surprisingly, Greece and Italy, two of the most popular tourism destinations, underperformed with respect to all four perspectives examined. We provide out-of-sample evidence that affluence levels explain the variation in the observed scores, while e-readiness, popularity of tourism destination and cultural richness are not statistically significant.