An exploratory study of the weather and calendar effects on tourism web site usage

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the weather and calendar effects on the usage pattern of a tourism web site.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper analyses data from a yearlong web log involving 21,655,089 visitors to a popular tourism web site. The weather factors include rain, snow, cloud cover, and the calendar factors include seasons and holidays in order to test the proposed model.

Findings

Using data from the Korea Tourism Organisation and the Korean Meteorological Administration, the results show that when it was rainy, cloudy, summer or a workday, the number of visitors to the tourism information web site was higher.

Originality/value

The results provide managers involved in the tourism industry with useful insights for effective use of web sites by running them more efficiently and setting up appropriate marketing strategies in terms of the weather and calendar variables.

Citation

Gun Lim, G., Hyun Kim, D., Choi, M., Choi, J.H. and Chang Lee, K. (2010), "An exploratory study of the weather and calendar effects on tourism web site usage", Online Information Review, Vol. 34 No. 1, pp. 127-144. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684521011024164