A TURIZMUSMARKETING ONLINE FELÜLETEI SZÉKELYFÖLDÖN – ÖSSZEFÜGGÉSEK A VALÓS FORGALOMMAL

Abstract

The main focus of the present study is on finding a correlation – on destination level – between the online
presence of some local destinations in Szeklerland and the intensity of the tourism flows. It is hard to give a
comprehensive answer to such a complex question, because online presence can take a wide variety of
forms, it is a dynamic and ever changing world. What is more, tourism circulation statistical data in
Romania have some serious problems; they don’t reflect the true reality of the arrivals and nights spent,
because only parts of the actual flow are declared. However, our team has decided to pick up this challenge
with a method of research which observes 30 local destinations from Szeklerland (those with the highest
number of arrivals, for the last years). The observations will be made along five different aspects which can
be scored on different web sites and channels. Then we will correlate these activities with the tourism
statistical data available from the National Statistics Office’s database and see if the stronger online presence
comes with a more intense tourism flow on the other side (of course, we can’t prove the causality too, this
would require more data). The five aspects used for the online observation of Szekler towns are the
following: the quality of their own websites, the quality and relevance in tourism of their Facebook sites, the
availability and quality of the videos on the YouTube channel, the quantity of the available attractions and
services according to the first ten Google hits, and the quantity (mainly) of accommodation units, according
to some lodging intermediary sites. These five aspects may be highly subjective, but we will try to reduce
the subjectivity of the analysis, with a large team with specific observation tasks for each member, and on
the other hand, with a very detailed observation method containing 5 sub-aspects for each aspect.
We expect a high correlation between the two dimensions, even if sometimes we eliminate the
population size. According to our preliminary data, in some cases there are 75-80% correlations between the
Google trends locality data and the five year long, monthly tourism flows data.