A Study of Japanese and Taiwanese Tourism Web Sites: A Content Analysis

• Main Authors: Yuko Aso, 麻生世子
• Other Authors: Che-Jen Su
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2008
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/98110526923311946876

碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 管理學研究所 === 96 === Since emergence of the World Wide Web, more tourists use the Internet to searching for travel related information. By increasing demand of travel and the Internet application, any well-designed tourism web site which targets the tourism industry in Asia seem have potential. The purposes of this study are: To identify some similarities and differences between Japanese and Taiwanese tourism web sites. To identify each country’s web site characteristics. To investigate impression management strategies used by these tourism web sites. The research questions are: 1.What kind of characteristics do Japanese and Taiwanese tourism web sites have? What are the differences and similarities which we can identify among them? 2. Which impression management strategies does each site tend to use? Is there any tendency to differ between Japanese and Taiwanese tourism web sites? A content analysis was selected as a research method. We took 47 samples from Japan, 25 samples from Taiwan, total of 72 samples, as research unit.　Research contents included checking whether certain tourism web site provided content relating to foreign languages, mobile phone service, public transportation information, links to hotels or accommodations, and the attribution of impression management strategy. We chose three strategies to choose, they are Ingratiation, Competence and Exemplification. The result showed that Japanese tourism web sites mainly adopted three languages: English, Chinese, and Korean. On the other hand, Taiwanese web sites adopted two languages: English and Japanese. The largest difference which we identified was the use of Korean. Other relatively large differences were identified in photo galleries, weather information, and flash application. Both countries adopted to the most common impression management strategies, that is Competence and Ingratiation strategy.