Using Travel Blogs to Promote Romania as Tourist Destination. A Comparative Study on Personal Travel Blogs of French and Romanian Travellers
Using Travel Blogs to Promote Romania as Tourist Destination. A Comparative Study on Personal Travel Blogs of French and Romanian Travellers

Summary/Abstract: Although Facebook and Twitter traffic registers an important growth compared to blogs, the analysis of travel blogs remains extremely important for tourism marketers, as travelers use blogs for communicating their experiences, for offering objective evaluations and subjective opinions about the characteristics of visited destinations. They use social networks to increase the visibility of their blogs in the virtual space. Travel blogs represent a cheap and accessible information source about a travel destination, and bloggers participate in producing and broadcasting the tourist destination image in the virtual space. This study shows that blogs authored by those who aim at keeping in contact with their family and real life friends are suitable for analyzing a country’s image. Nonetheless, Romanian authors who aim for a broad and amorphous, unknown target can be better included in the promotion strategy of the destination image in the virtual space. Qualitative and quantitative analysis of a Romanian and French authors’ blogs sample shows that the type of communication used by travel blogs is decisive for the way in which they can be used in the communication strategy of Romania’s image as a tourist destination. Data revealed by this study can be used for elaborating communication strategies of Romania as a tourist destination for both local and foreign travelers.

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