Online Tourist Information in the Largest Polish Cities
Online Tourist Information in the Largest Polish Cities

Summary/Abstract: Purpose/Thesis: This paper analyzes selected tourism websites for the largest cities in Poland. The paper answers following research questions: are the different websites designed to provide the tourists the relevant information?; do local conditions shape the content provided on these websites?; are these websites multilingual?; do they suggest possible itineraries?; how do they develop? Approach/Methods: The article uses comparative quantitative and qualitative analysis to study the information systems employed by the websites of the largest Polish cities: Warsaw, Krakow, Lodz, Wroclaw, Poznan and Gdansk. These cities are popular tourist destinations; each has an information system, reflecting the specific tourist services they offer. Results and conclusions: The organization scheme for each website is different, despite the fact that they were all designed for related organizational entities gathered in the structure of Polish Tourism Organization. Each site has a different design and appearance; different resources were dedicated to each. They are more varied than the websites of the analogous organizations operating in countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden. The specificity of the region has more of an impact on the content offered to the user. In recent years, more flat websites, imitating the paper guides, were gradually replaced by multimedia platforms enabling various interactions with more dynamic content. Originality/Value: To the best of the author’s knowledge, the research presented in the paper is the first attempt to characterize and compare tourist information websites of the six largest cities in Poland.

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