One promise of the internet is that tourism bureaus and other advertisers should be able to reduce their traditional reliance on mass advertising and develop a more targeted approach to seeking customers. Although travel sites on the worldwide web are growing in importance (e.g., Travelocity, priceline.com, Expedia), the major vehicles for tourism promotion continue to be conventional mass media (e.g., television, radio, and print) and travel agencies. Both of those traditional approaches have their problems, however. The constraints of advertising in mass media are well known, including cost ineffectiveness and limited customer exposure. Certainly, advertising costs can be substantial. As an example, the Hong Kong Tourism Board spent more than US$3.5 million for promotional advertising and literature in 2000. For their part, travel agencies are lessexpensive marketing channels than mass media, but tourism bureaus have little control over travel agencies’ specific marketing efforts toward a particular region. Considering that the business operations of travel agents are usually profit driven, their loyalty is to their customers’ preferences and not to the priorities of any particular destination. Given the weaknesses of existing channels, as well as the prospects engendered by the web, we suggest that an ideal marketing plan should accomplish the following objectives: (1) Minimize costs—Obtain maximum exposure of promotional messages to a broad customer base, while at the same time minimizing the implementation costs; (2) Maximize marketing effectiveness—Understand better customers’ needs and communicate individually with target customers; and