Paper short abstract:

The paper presents a web-based approach to Romanian rural tourism aiming at identifying the most salient image(s) of the countryside as well as the actors responsible for creating them. The results are based on a hyperlink network analysis followed by content analysis of relevant websites.

Paper long abstract:

The paper presents a web-based approach to Romanian rural tourism. My aim is to identify the most salient image(s) of the Romanian countryside and the actors responsible for creating them. There is a wide variety of institutions and individuals involved in developing rural tourism in Romania: national and international organisations, tour operators, accommodation networks, as well as private businesses belonging to villagers and to non-local entrepreneurs. They all work to attract tourists by creating and marketing destinations, and the web is one of the main arenas for their advertising. However, websites have different degrees of visibility and search engines return results in a hierarchy with apparently the most relevant websites at the top. My first question is therefore what makes some websites more salient than others? The methodology I use is innovative and falls within the area of Webometrics. Knowing that prominent web pages will usually have a high number of in-links (other websites liking to them), with the help of LexiUrl software, I systematically identify and investigate hyperlinks between websites. A set of network diagrams are then created to reveal the websites which have a high degree of centrality and which are considered to be the most visible and dominant. The web pages identified this way are subjected to a qualitative content analysis, looking at which elements of material and non-material culture, and which experiences are being packaged in the tourist offer, while also discussing some of the reasons behind their effectiveness and high online visibility.