Abstract
The application of brand theory to destinations has grown in the last few decades, with the destination brand personality being a viable metaphor for creating and positioning destination brands. An often-overlooked tourism typology is geotourism; more specifically, volcanic tourism, since it can be a passive element of any tourism form or active nature tourism. However, its potential is relatively unexplored in terms of online branding. For this reason, the present study analyzes online brand image co-creation, using 300 websites related to three unique volcanic tourism destinations—Iceland, the Azores, and the Canary Islands. Three different types of sources (destination marketing organizations, commercial, and editorial websites) created these contents. The results demonstrate significant differences between the communication of the three destinations, with Iceland, where there is less aligned communication, most valuing geo elements in their communication, and the Azores, where all stakeholders communicate similar brand personality traits, displaying more aligned communication regarding brand personality. In the Canary Islands geotourism is less explored as a destination offer and is consequently less communicated. Acknowledging the different brand positioning and the parity and differentiation points among destinations with the same baseline offer—volcanic tourism—can be helpful for destination brand managers to reignite tourism and promote a unique tourism experience.
Highlights
Tourism has grown rapidly in the past decades, originating from a wide range of tourism typologies that vary in target and experience offered, which are anchored in more passive or more active tourism activities [1]
To answer these research since systematically collected on volcano tourism destination brandingquestions, are non-existent, this study began withdata a data-gathering tourism branding non-existent, this study began with a volcanic data-gathering processdestination that drew on the richare body of online information for different destinaprocess that drew on the rich body of online information for different volcanic destinations
The first analysis was performed on the raw, non-hierarchical, and non-categorized contents of the destination marketing organizations (DMOs) web pages. This resulted in a general analysis of the topics, expressions, and words most frequently used by the DMOs
Summary
Tourism has grown rapidly in the past decades, originating from a wide range of tourism typologies that vary in target and experience offered, which are anchored in more passive or more active tourism activities [1]. The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged tourism in several ways, through locking people down in quarantine and suspending access to foreign tourists through closed borders. In this situation, destinations are impelled to revisit their brand management and find unique brand elements to communicate online, which can give potential tourists incentive to start dreaming of travel and encourage tourists to visit the destination to reignite its tourism activities [6]. According to Dowling and Newsome [9], geotourism has expanded to encompass a number of attributes—geology, tourism, geosites, visits, and interpretation—and needs to be considered not as a type of nature tourism but as an approach to nature [9] and sustainable tourism [10]. Besides promoting tourists’ visits to geosites, and supporting the driven social-economic benefits, geotourism reinforces the local need to value and preserve the geodiversity
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