Abstract:

Tourism of nowadays is strongly influenced by the internet and different online applications. But the existing university syllabuses of tourism management and marketing are mainly not adapted to cover the topic of online reputation. There are courses focused on reputation management available, only few are focused on online reputation and even less are focused on online reputation in tourism and hospitality. The new course of “Online reputation management” will support students to increase the skills and key competences in this area.

The main objective of the Erasmus+ project “Online Reputation Management” (ORM), which is run by 4 European partner universities, is to create a syllabus and teaching materials for the new course that will enable to teach this topic for the students systematically and based on a real data and experience.

One of the research groups involved in ORM, is tourism business enterprises (companies, destinations, sightseeing etc). To create teaching materials for the course, besides other topics, it was decided to conduct separate research in destination ORM. eWOM of this group has its own motivations, needs and expectations regarding online reputation. As the overall strategy of the project is to develop skills and competencies of future managers and tourism workers, it was decided to conduct a semi-structed interview with tourist boards and destination bureaus by all project partner universities. Questions for the interview were created so that the answers help to describe, how destination managers work with eWOM reviews of the customers in current times.

Due to corona pandemic, interviews were conducted online, manually transcripted, and analyzed. The qualitative questionnaire is formed by 8 main questions in important macro-areas. In each macro-area there are 5-8 smaller questions, which help the interviewee answering the main one.

This article describes the answers which were collected in Finland. Messages were sent to 16 destination marketing organizations (DMO’s), which were chosen randomly without any relevance to any Finnish tourist destination. Due to the overload of this period of the year, only 3 answers were received. But answers were so alike that is could be concluded that the attitude of other Finnish DMO’s could be rather similar. The research shows that eWOM is managed well in Finland. Social media networks and destination websites are mostly appreciated by the Finnish DMO’s. Finnish destination managers understand importance of online reputation and have a person in charge or giving this duty to a staff person who is managing eWOM’s by handling effectively both positive and negative reviews. They are quickly responding to online reviews from within CRM platforms, and creating customized campaigns by influencing the customer journey, which is resulting in increased guest engagement and direct bookings.

Results of these interviews give the relevant data for creation of the sustainable teaching materials for an e-learning module, which will lead to the most visible result of the project.

Keywords:

Erasmus+ project, online reputation, ORM, eWOM, destination, DMO, Finland.