An evaluation of official Government Tourism Websites as a knowledge-based platform to improve the development of sustainable tourism

Abstract

The development of sustainable tourism is a very extensive domain of work and characterized by many complex challenges that increase with the global market pursuit to become more competitive. A knowledge-based platform is essential for policy makers and managers in order to support responsible decision making at different levels. Tourism is an area of increasingly intensive production and consumption of information. The main purpose of this study is to analyze if Portuguese public organizations, operating in the tourism destination of the Alentejo, use official tourism websites to transfer knowledge with a view to sharing data and information about the overall scope of sustainable development issues. It was used the content analysis research technique to evaluate the set of characteristics of information content within official websites. The results indicate these organizations are not very committed to using official websites as a knowledgebased platform to share information.