Online tourism brand management at a local scale in Valencian Community

Abstract

The tourism sector is key in the Spanish economy. The competition among the variety of tourist destinations causes that they have to differentiate themselves, they need to create a powerful image of their brand territory and promote it. The aim of this article is to analyse how some tourism villages in the Valencian Community develop their tourism brand management in the online world. For this purpose, we are taking as a simple four villages of this community who belonged to the network of “Los Pueblos más Bonitos de España” in 2018: Peñíscola, Morella, Vilafamés and El Castell de Guadalest. As a methodology, the online presence of these touristic brands with their corporative web, social networks or other touristic networks that belong to them (among others) were analysed. Moreover, different interviews with the responsible of the tourism communication of each village were carried out. With all the information, we were able to obtain a view about how some villages, which are considered really successful in terms of tourism in the Valencian Community, manage their touristic brand in the online world and, aby the same token, we will be able to analyse what practises in the online brand management can create more benefits for touristic brands.