General Purpose of research. Understanding tourism industry dinamics on the web

This reasearch aims to describe and analyse in detail the objectives, activities and results ob- tained by the experimental research programme TUR.N. 2.0 (an acronym for Tourism and Network- ing). This programme was carried out by a busi- ness cluster adhering to the Innovation Pole for Advanced Services, in collaboration with two universities in Abruzzo. Social networks are revolu- tionizing the normal processes of interaction with individuals and organizations, offering the oppor- tunity to interact and engage, bringing people with shared interests and activities together in vir- tual spaces that determine concrete choices in real places, transforming the tourism market’s supply and demand chain. In some cases, online networking has replaced tra- ditional intermediation. In other cases, it serves as a marketing tool, enabling new tourism offers previ- ously excluded by tour operators because they were underestimated or not appreciated. In the new sup- ply and demand chain, tourists, intervening first in the decision-making process and later in their eval- uation of the service, reveal themselves to be pre- cious strategic advisers, new promoters of the offer or support consultants. From these considerations, the strategic research project TUR.N. 2.0 (Tourism and Networking) has a specific purpose: to build a model for mapping and promoting the offer of the tourism product, through the creation of a software prototype able to ask relevant questions to Web users, creating an incentive for them to establish a strong relationship in order to offer better guidance in the search for information within the Web areas in which the prototype is applied.