Exploring the Food Tourism Effectiveness of Official Websites of BRICS Nations

Abstract

BRICS is the association of five major developing national economies named Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. These five nations are synchronically rising up for ameliorating their economies. Occupying more than 25% of the total land area of the world and also more than 40% of the world population, these five BRICS nations have only a little share of world travel as compared to occidental world. Being rich in natural, cultural and food and culinary heritage, these five nations have bright future to become top most tourism destinations across the world. The proper marketing and promotion via internet marketing tool like websites can be of great help to promote culinary heritage of any destination and therefore, helps to improve the tourism graph of the destination. Discerning the significant importance of the websites in the promotion of food tourism for any destination, the present study aims at the comparative content analysis of the official tourism websites of BRICS nations to evaluate their performance in the context of promotion of food and culinary heritage on world -wide web. The modified Balanced ScoreCard (BSC) approach is incorporated into the evaluation by taking into consideration four perspectives: technical, user friendliness and site attractiveness, tourism effectiveness and food tourism effectiveness. A set of 88 critical success factors representing these four perspectives is then used to investigate the websites. The present study ponders upon the relative strength and weakness of the tourism websites of BRICS nations in promoting food tourism and as well help suggesting the remedial measures in mobilizing the food tourism promotion through websites.