Localization of Three European National Tourism Offices' Websites. An Exploratory Analysis

With the globalization of traveling, due to favorable socio-economic and political contexts as well as to the tourism communication and marketing supported by ICTs, the issue of translating destinations’ websites has become particularly relevant. New in-source markets are not only requiring adequate tourism and hospitality products, and services, they also need a tailor-made communication, which takes into account their language, cultural background, and habits. Such cultural translation is defined as “localization”. While there is a wide consensus on the importance of localization especially in the trade and marketing sector, this topic is under-researched in the tourism domain. In this research, three European National Tourism Offices’ websites have been analyzed, according to an ad-hoc designed framework, in order to study their localization activities when it comes to the US-American and the Italian-speaking markets. Results have shown that content managers have devoted great attention to localizing the content of National Tourism Offices’ websites, thus confirming most of the hypotheses based on Hofstede’s cultural model.