General Purpose of research. Understanding tourism industry dinamics on the web

This reasearch aims to describe and analyse in
detail the objectives, activities and results ob-
tained by the experimental research programme
TUR.N. 2.0 (an acronym for Tourism and Network-
ing). This programme was carried out by a busi-
ness cluster adhering to the Innovation Pole for
Advanced Services, in collaboration with two
universities in Abruzzo. Social networks are revolu-
tionizing the normal processes of interaction with
individuals and organizations, offering the oppor-
tunity to interact and engage, bringing people
with shared interests and activities together in vir-
tual spaces that determine concrete choices in real
places, transforming the tourism market’s supply
and demand chain.
In some cases, online networking has replaced tra-
ditional intermediation. In other cases, it serves as a
marketing tool, enabling new tourism offers previ-
ously excluded by tour operators because they were
underestimated or not appreciated. In the new sup-
ply and demand chain, tourists, intervening first in
the decision-making process and later in their eval-
uation of the service, reveal themselves to be pre-
cious strategic advisers, new promoters of the offer
or support consultants. From these considerations,
the strategic research project TUR.N. 2.0 (Tourism
and Networking) has a specific purpose: to build a
model for mapping and promoting the offer of the
tourism product, through the creation of a software
prototype able to ask relevant questions to Web
users, creating an incentive for them to establish a
strong relationship in order to offer better guidance
in the search for information within the Web areas in
which the prototype is applied.