Communication and branding on national tourism websites

Official websites are crucial tools for image dissemination, brand promotion and marketing of destinations. National Tourism Organizations are aware of the need to create, maintain and update an Official Destination Website in order to engage with current and potential visitors. This paper presents a quality assessment of the official destination websites of five countries - Spain, Brazil, Argentina, Chile and China - obtained from applying the Web Quality Index. The results show that the best quality is achieved by Spain's official destination website followed by those of Argentina, Chile, Brazil and China. The research also reveals that the national tourism websites require a clear improvement in areas such as interactivity, persuasiveness and commercialization.