The online branding of tourism destinations as sustainable: a cross-national analysis
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2021-07-13
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en
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Sustainable tourism is gaining popularity among tourists and practitioners alike, and is
now seen as one of the most critical aspects within the tourism industry. DMOs have
also recognized the potential of using sustainability in their branding strategies to
become or remain a competitive destination. However, it remains difficult to get all
stakeholders to communicate the same identity of the destination. This study has
aimed to provide more insight into the online sustainability destination branding of both
DMOs and tour operators. A cross-national analysis was conducted to be able to
compare the online sustainable destination branding of Costa Rica and Slovenia on
websites. From the analysis can be concluded that both countries use sustainability as
an attribute of their destination identity, although Slovenia seems to have put a greater
emphasis on this than Costa Rica. Both focus mainly on the environmental dimension
of sustainable tourism, whilst they differ in the way they substantiate this. The
challenge of getting all stakeholders to contribute to the same desired image resulted
to be present, especially for Slovenia. The difference between the official and nonofficial tourism websites with regards to the sustainability messages seemed to be
substantial, specifically between the Slovenian DMO website and the Slovenian tour
operator. For Costa Rica, this was less so the case. Future research will have to
confirm whether such differences in the online sustainable destination branding also
exist for other tourism destinations and for tour operators from different countries.
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Faculteit der Letteren