Information Engineering Letters, ISSN: 2160-4114

Volume 2, Number 4, December, 2012

Destination Marketing for Remote Area Using an Experience-Based

Tourism Website
HsiuLi Liaoa, SuHoun Liu b, ChienHeng Chenc
Department of Information Management, Chung Yuan Christian University,
No. 200, Chung Pei Rd., Chung Li, 320, Taiwan, R.O.C.
a
wenlly@im.cycu.edu.tw, bvandy@im.cycu.edu.tw, chieicat@gmail.com
doi.10.5729/iel.vol2.issue4.8

Keywords: Tourist scheduling, Experiential marketing, Destination marketing.

Abstract. This study developed an Experience-based Tourism Website prototype. Contrast to the
traditional information-based website, users can interacted with the website to arrange their own
customized schedule and the system will generated a tour handbook for their scheduled tour. 107
users were recruited to participate in this study in order to test the effectiveness of the
Experience-based Tourism Website. The result indicated that our website can increase users
experience with the website and then increase their intention to visit the remote location we are
promoting. We were convinced that the Experience-based Tourism Website can be a helping hand for
organizations that try to do destination marketing on the Internet, especially for those organizations
that are working on infamous remote areas.

1. Introduction
Tourism marketing and promotion is clearly essential for successful tourism development for any
locations (Cities, Areas, Countries). Moreover, tourism marketing has become increasingly complex.
It is no longer concerned simply with representing or conveying an image of a place, but with
attempting to sell an experience of a place by explicitly relating to the lifestyles of consumers [1].
Even though various research has focused on the analysis of the ways in which tourism marketing and
branding actively creates and constructs certain destinations for development [2]. However, for a
remote area that lack of resources and fame, trying to practice destination marketing by the traditional
way of doing can be a task that near to mission impossible.
Destination Marketing is "a proactive, strategic, visitor-centered approach to the economic and
cultural development of a location, which balances and integrates the interests of visitors, service
providers, and the community." [3]. Nowadays, the Internet is becoming a pervasive environmental
element for tourist consumers and their family. The Internet is similar to these innovations in that it
allows tourism organization to communicate with their customer [4]. However, unlike typical
technology-enabled interactions between consumers and firms, the consumer role in online
interactions is active and self-initiated. For example, while online obtaining information, negotiating
terms, and making purchases, customers control when the interactions occur, their duration, their
content, and their scope. Confronting with this Internet circumstances, many marketing researchers
have drawn their attention to the experiential nature of goods and services [5].
Both consumption and decision making processes related to tourism are to a large extent driven by
hedonic and emotional aspects [6] and memory of trips are a function of trip-related experiences and
the stories we construct from them. This recognition of the experiential nature of tourism and of new

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consumer trends calls for marketing approaches that make use of innovative ways for communicating
tourism experiences [7].
When someone wants to do destination marketing for a specific location, they usually will set up a
tourism website for their campaign. Traditionally, these website is served as an information source
only, But based on the previous research findings, we can concluded that if the website can provide
enough utility and value recognized by interactive with their users, it may increase users intention to
visit. In another words, by creating potential customers virtue experience related to the location, the
website can be a critical tool for destination marketing especially for those remote areas.
This study focuses on the tourism websites that are doing destination marketing for some remote
areas. The researchers of this paper proposed that interactivity can be put into the traditional tourism
website and increase users intention to visit by create their virtue experience with the remote areas.
In this paper, we will investigate the relationship between Intention to Visit and both the Experience
with Website and the Experience with Location. The Four Realms of Experience proposed by [8]
were used to measure the users Experience with Website. And the factors, proposed by [9] which
influence the use of communications relate to recreation and tourism experiences, were used to
represent users Experience with Location.

2. Marketing on the internet: the role of user experience

Practicing experiential marketing on tourism has to be somewhat unusual in that as a product it cannot
usually be sampled prior to purchase. Purchase decisions are therefore made on the basis of available
information and the projected and perceived images of place [1]. Therefore, it has been argued that
conventional practice of marketing on tourism, such as the advertising and promotion, tends to
confirm the intentions of tourists rather than actually persuading them to visit a new destination [10].
In another words, hospitality and tourism industry may requiring a shift away from a focus on
facilities and services to a focus on providing customized experiences [11]. For example, several
European cities have repackaged their tourist attractions as experiences resulting in a differentiated
product with higher economic value [12, 13, 14] The expectation of a pleasurable and memorable
experience is what motivates consumers to purchase products and services [13]. Vogt and Fesenmaier
[9] have expanded conventional functional information search model and identified four additional
needs: hedonic, innovation, aesthetic, and sign needs. They have emphasized that information needs
other than functional needs capture psychological, sociological, aesthetical, and symbolic
experiences of information searching. According to their advice, websites that aimed on experience
have to recognize that needs pursued by information searcher play an important role in defining the
content presented and the way of presentation.
The pervasiveness of the Internet coupled with the keenness in competition among business has
led to virtual experiential marketing (VEM). VEM embraces the Internet and its various channels,
including blogs, chat rooms, interactive images, virtual communities and multi- play game playing,
and technology to create an enriched environmental experience through visual and audio cues and
produce an immersive experience [15]. To meet the demands of the changing market place, Pine and
Gilmore [8] had offered a framework for understanding and evaluating experiential consumptions
that has conceptual and practical relevance to the tourism industry since experiences are the core
product in that industry. The underlying features of tourism experiences have been theorized as four
realms: education, esthetics, escapism and entertainment [8, 16]. Jurowski [7] had provides evidence
to support this Four Realms of Tourism Experiences theory by demonstrating that the underlying
dimensions of tourist participation in specified activities can be organized as entertainment, education,
escapism and esthetics.
In Taiwan, we have many commercial tourism websites designated for marketing specific
destination. Even though those websites are now a major communication and marketing channels for
their tourism campaign in Taiwan, most of the websites provide only simply tourist information or
standard suites of journey. For those website owners, VEM is like analyzing a conspiracy

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theory-everyone talks about it, but look for any traces in the records and it just isnt there.
Nevertheless, there are more than 80% of Taiwanese tourists are now self-service travelers.
According to the survey [17], these self-service travelers are more than travelers but
experience-seekers. They were always looking for new location to enrich their memorable
experiences. But still, for these self-service travelers, the design of those tourist websites could
neither help them customize their own tours nor improve their intention to tour an unfamiliar location.

3. The development of an experience-based tourism website

In order to create the most virtue experience from using our Experience-based Tourism Website, we
have followed the procedure of leisure and recreation decision proposed by [18]. To schedule his tour,
the user has to interact with his Personal Travel Assistant. The Personal Travel Assistant (PTA) is a
computer agent that will work with the users through three steps: 1. Recommendation, 2. Evaluation
and 3. Negotiation. Every time when the user needs to make a decision (e.g. Where should I stay at
night?), he can request the PTA to make a recommendation for him. When the user had made a
decision (e.g. I want to stay at KiTin Hostel?), the PTA will do the feasibility evaluation for him. If
there are any conflict exist (e.g. I want to stay at KiTin Hostel may conflict with I want to arrive at
my hotel no later than 7PM), the PTA will do the negotiation with the user and try to come out a
better solution. After the user had finish scheduling his tour, the PTA will generate a tour handbook
according to the format selected by the user himself. There is three databases to facilitated these
processes: 1. Sites DB, 2. Schedule DB and 3. Format DB. All Databases are implemented in an
Object-relational DBMS environment (Oracle 11g). The Sites DB contains information of various
sites in the area. The Schedule DB contains the schedules developed by various users previously. And
the Format DB contains templates that can be used to generate a customized tour handbook for the
user in PDF format.

4. Research model and hypotheses

According to the researches of Holbrook & Hirshman [19], Boulding [20,21], and Phelps [22]. When
user search and browse tourist information, they will more understand and interest of the touring
spots and encourage their intention to take the tour in the future. By implementing the
Experience-based Tourism Website, the tourists website experience can be increased by interactive
with the website by making their own touring schedule and produce their customized tour handbooks.
In this study, the Four Realms of Experience (education, esthetics, escapism and entertainment)
proposed by Pine and Gilmore [8] were used to measure the users Experience with Website. The
increase of tourists Experience with Website will create their Intention to Visit via increasing their
Experience with Location. The users Experience with Location are measured by the five factors
(Functional, hedonic, innovation, aesthetic, and sign), proposed by Vogt and Fesenmaier [9] (see
figure 1).

Figure 1. Research model

Thus, the following hypotheses were investigated:
Hypothesis 1: Compare to the traditional website, website with customize scheduling will generated
higher user experience with the website. If the website can generate a tour handbook after users have
created their own schedule, it will create even higher user experience with the website.
Hypothesis 2: Website that can create higher user experience with the website will have higher user
experience with the location it promoted.

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Hypothesis 3: When users have higher experience with the location, they will have higher intention
to pay a visit to the location that promoted by the website.

5. Method
In this study, the experiment scenario was defined after several preliminary studies in order to ensure
the effectiveness of the settings. The destination that our website wanted to promote is the Yun-Pin
County, a not-so-popular tourism region in Taitung which located in the southeast side of the Taiwan
island. The Yun-Pin County comprised of four aboriginal communities with unique natural and
cultural resources and some dramatic geological features. The participants of this study were
recruited through ad banners posted on a leading commercial website in Taiwan: www.sogi.com. In
this experiment, participants were asked to use our tourism website to schedule a trip to Yun-Pin. We
have 117 people volunteer to participate in the experiment, among them, 107 participants were
selected and they were then divided into the following groups:
1 Group A: Traditional Tourism Website
Participants in Group A use a website 100% copy from a commercial tourism website in Taiwan.
On this website, they can browse the tourist information on the website and read several suite of
tourist schedule suggested by the website.
2 Group B: Website with Interactive Scheduling
Participants in Group B use the same website just like Group A. But their website also allow them
to use the scheduling function in order to interact with the website to arrange their customized
schedules.
3 Group C: Website with Interactive Scheduling and Customized Tour Handbook
Participants in Group C use the same website just like Group B. After they have finished their
scheduling process, their website allowed them to generate a customized tour handbook for their own
touring schedules.
After their usage of the website, a questionnaire was distributed to those participants. The
questionnaire contained 31 psychographic and 6 respondent demographic items (i.e., gender, age,
education, occupation, online experience, length of online experience). The psychographic items
were taken from prior research studies and refined through focus group discussions and interviews
with experienced tourists. Responses were measured on 5-point Likert-type scales (1 = strongly
disagree, 5 = strongly agree). The questionnaire was organized into three sections: Experience with
Website (13), Experience with Location (15), and Intention to Visit (3).

6. Research finding
Among the 107 questionnaires distributed in the experiment, 97 were returned and usable,
representing a 90.7% response rate. All reliability measures were >0.6 besides aesthetic and sign
constructs of experience with location (Item No. 24~28). Therefore, aesthetic and sign constructs of
Table 1. Construct items and reliabilities

Sections Constructs Item No. Cronbachs

education 1,2,3,4 0.659
entertainment 5,6,7 0.776
Experience with Website
esthetics 8,9,10 0.828
escapism 11,12,13 0.858
functional 14,15,16,17 0.725
Experience with Location hedonic 18,19,20 0.616
innovation 21,22,23 0.704

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 aesthetic 24,25 0.272
sign 26,27,28 0.583
Intention to Visit Intention to Visit 29,30,31 0.822
experience with location are deleted in the study. The -level of the sample indicates a reasonable
level of reliability (>0.60) [23], demonstrating adequate internal consistency in Table 1.
Table 2. Test of group difference on Experience with Website, Experience with Location and Intention to Visit

Sum of Sum of mean

df F test P value
Squares squares
Between of
4.46 2 2.23 6.291 0.003***
education variation
Within of
33.318 94 0.354
variation
Total of variation 37.778 96
Between of
3.869 2 1.934 6.202 0.003***
entertainment variation
Within of
29.318 94 0.312
variation
Experience with Total of variation 33.187 96
Website Between of
0.115 2 0.057 0.161 0.852
esthetics variation
Within of
33.514 94 0.357
variation
Total of variation 33.629 96
Between of
4.208 2 2.104 3.919 0.023**
variation
escapism Within of
50.468 94 0.537
variation
Total of variation 54.676 96
Between of
23.774 2 11.887 32.361 0.000***
function variation
Within of
34.529 94 0.367
variation
Total of variation 58.302 96
Between of
1.133 2 0.567 4.402 0.015**
hedonic variation
Experience with Within of
Location 12.102 94 0.129
variation
Total of variation 13.236 96
Between of
3.074 2 1.537 4.999 0.009***
innovation variation
Within of
28.901 94 0.307
variation
Total of variation 31.975 96
Intention to Between of
4.883 2 2.441 8.294 0.000***
Visit variation
Intention to Visit Within of
27.671 94 0.294
variation
Total of variation 32.554 96
***p<0.01 **p<0.05 *p<0.1
Evaluation the effectiveness of the Experience-based Tourism Website(table 2)
1 The means of all constructs in Group A are lower than Group B and Group C.

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 2 The means of education construct of experience with website in Group C are significantly
higher than Group A (p=0.002). There are not significant differences in the means of education
construct of experience with website between Group A and Group B as well as Group B and Group C.
Therefore, using interactive scheduling function and handbook generating function at the same time
have a higher effect on education construct of experience with website.
3 The means of entertainment construct of experience with website in Group B (p=0.017) and
Group C (p=0.004) are significantly higher than Group A. But there are not significant differences
between Group B and Group C. The results indicate that the using interactive scheduling function
influence the entertainment construct of experience with website but the document does not influence
it.
The means of esthetics construct of experience with website in Group C are significantly higher
than Group A (p=0.02). There are not significant differences in the means of education construct of
experience with website between Group A and Group B as well as Group B and Group C. Therefore,
using interactive scheduling function and handbook generating function at the same time have a
higher impact on the esthetics construct of experience with website.
The results of regression analysis testing (Table 3) include path coefficients and R2 values. The
path coefficients are the relationships between the dependent and independent constructs. The R2
values represent the degree to which variance is explained by independent constructs. The test of
research model indicated that the experience with website positively affect the experience with
location (=0.656, p<0.01). The experience with location has a positive effect on intention to visit
(=0.652, p<0.01).
Table 3. The result of the regression analysis

Independent variable Dependent variable Standardized T value P value

Experience with Experience with
0.684 0.656 8.469 0.000***
Website Location
Experience with
Intention to Visit 0.813 0.652 8.378 0.000***
Location
***p<0.01 **p<0.05 *p<0.1

Significant path
*** p<0.01** p<0.05* p<0.1
Non-Significant path

Figure 2. The Intention to Visit Model of the Tourism Website

In Figure 2, the education ( = 0.387, p < 0.01), entertainment ( = 0.400, p < 0.01) and esthetics (
= -0.263, p < 0.01) of the experience with website positively influence the function of the experience
with location, accounting for 42.7% of the variance in the function construct. The education ( =
0.285, p < 0.05), entertainment ( = 0.272, p < 0.05) significantly affect the hedonic of the experience
with location, accounting for 28.8% of the variance in the hedonic construct. The entertainment ( =
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0.273, p < 0.05), esthetics ( = 0.154, p < 0.1) and escapism ( = 0.355, p < 0.01) of the experience
with website positively influence the innovation of the experience with location, accounting for
43.5% of the variance in the innovation construct. Besides, the function ( = 0.438, p < 0.01) and
innovation ( = 0.378, p < 0.01) of the experience with location have positive impacts on the intention
to visit, accounting for 45.7% of the variance in the intention construct.

7. Conclusion and discussion

The finding of this study as we have proposed and indicated that:
1) Users Experience with Website did influence their Experience with Location and the
Experience with Location then influence their intention to visit the remote location.
2) By implementing the interactive scheduling and handbook generating functions into the tourism
website, they can enhance the website users experience with the tourism website, and thus will
improve their experience with the remote location (in this study, the Yun-Pin County), and then
improve their intention to pay a visit to Yun-Pin.
3) Our research findings had provided further evidence to identify the relationship between the
Experience-based Tourism Website and its users experience with the website. It shows that the
website had different impact on the four realms of experiences that proposed by Pine and Gilmore [8].
The impact on education experience and escapism experience can be significant only when we have
enabled both the scheduling and handbook generating functions. There is no significant difference
between the traditional website and our Experience-based Tourism Website on the esthetics
experience. On the entertainment experience, only the scheduling function has significant impact.
The impact on the handbook generating function is insignificant.
Even though users with higher Experience with Location will have higher intention to visit the
remote location, our findings also indicated that only function and innovation needs had significant
impacts on users Intention to Visit.
The study revealed that the users functional need could be more satisfied by higher education and
entertainment experience. Higher esthetics experience had a negative impact on the functional need.
Furthermore, the innovation need can be improved by higher escapism, esthetics and entertainment
experiences.
While the study revealed that interactivity can be put into the traditional tourism website and
increase users intention to visit by create their virtue experience with the remote areas. Future
research should examine the impact of the experience-based tourism website on different type of user.
For example, users with different personal involvement and general compliance, will their intention
can be enhanced through different aspects of their virtue experiences? It is obvious that more research
is needed to validate the role of virtue experience plays in visiting a website. It is clear that the
exploration of the tourist experience theory is in it nascent stage and that a significant amount of
research is needed to guide planners and marketing managers in creating memorable and valuable
experiences for their customers.

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