Study on Chinese Tourism Web Sites' Distribution and Online Marketing Effects.

Abstract

As a platform and carrier of tourism information, tourism websites (TWs) and online tourism marketing have deeply affected the tourism industry. The authors adopt a geographical perspective to analyze the distribution of Chinese tourism websites (CTWs), and statistical analysis with SPSS16.0 was conducted to explore the online marketing effects of CTWs, and some meaningful results has been produced: 1) The number of CTWs generally decreases from eastern China to central and western China, and are especially dominant in tourism developed provinces. 2) The number of tourists has strong statistical correlation with the number of CTWs. 3) The strongest correlation for inbound tourists is with hotel websites, and the highest correlation coefficient is 0.807 between the number of domestic tourist and resort websites. Both inbound and domestic tourists have a low correlation coefficient with travel agency websites (TA). 4) There exist some statistical models between tourist numbers and different kinds of CTWs. The results clearly unveil the marketing effects and correlation of CTWs and is helpful for further online marketing strategies.