Tourism, ICT and Regional Economic Development: The Case of kiwitrails

Governments around the world are adopting ICT-enabled strategies to enhance tourism's business and regional economic performance. This paper examines the implementation of a one such project designed to support tourism and local economic development in the East Coast region of New Zealand's North Island. A review is presented of the past five years of the development of ‘Kiwitrails’, a web-based virtual community of businesses and communities who are defining their own internet presence through ‘web-raising,’ and the use of open-source web development software. The latter part of the paper reflects on the key issues that have emerged during the implementation and early operation of the project. It is argued that many of the lessons learnt from this particular case are of relevance to community informatics-oriented tourism development programs elsewhere.

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