Editorial: Special issue on ENTER2015

As information and communication technology (ICT) has become integral to key processes supporting travel and tourism, it is important for research and development to continue providing innovative approaches and critical reflections for the effective use of ICT in the tourism industry. The papers published in this volume are extended versions of highly selected research papers among the many contribution presented at ENTER2015 eTourism Conference, which took place in Lugano, Switzerland, on February 3–6, 2015, organized by the International Federation for IT and Travel & Tourism (IFITT). While far from being inclusive of all research areas in ICT and tourism, the collection of five articles in this special issue provides an excellent selection of the latest research on applications of ICT in travel and tourism. Social media has been one of the prominent areas of research in tourism and ICT since the last decade (Dwivedi et al. 2011; Hvass and Munar 2012; Leung et al. 2013). In tourism literature, the topic is highly associated with the different aspects of tourism marketing (Hays et al. 2013), including consumer behaviour (Munar and Jacobsen 2014; Tham et al. 2013; Xiang and Gretzel 2010) and destination branding (Lim et al. 2012; Munar 2011). The first three articles in this volume discuss how tourism destinations and hospitality businesses make strategic use of social media and user-generated content to communicate and assess destination brands among their consumers. The first article (Huertas and Marine-Roig 2015) explores the effectiveness of destination brand communication via social media by analysing user reactions (i.e., likes, comments, shares, mentions, etc.) to destination brand