Technology and Destination Promotion in Asian Tourism: Challenges, Changes, and Bearing

Destination promotion for tourism is an act of differentiating a destination together with its offers from other destinations with similar offers in order to create a distinct position within the market. In the pre-industrial and industrial states in place of orderly destination promotion, printed or written travel reports, diaries, articles, travelogues, or information received through word of mouth publicity evoke interests to visit a destination. With the emergence of the new economy at the mass tourism and its alternatives’ behest, promotion of organized tourism using print media came to be customary. The promotional activities took place within the hegemonic control of state or national tourism bodies or at entrepreneurs, product developers, and marketers’ direct control. It was principally product-driven and subjective to entrepreneurs’ expectation about the norms of experience on holiday. Tourism destination promotion becomes technology-driven at large with increased practices of uploading and sharing information, impressions and experiences about a destination in various digital or social media in the twenty-first century. The neo-sociotechnological reality pushed the majority of tourism destination promoters to utilize digital or social media in promotional activities and use the B2B, B2C, C2B, and S2B (B, C, S, namely, business, consumer, and ground service providers) social networks to receive and develop a better perception of the destination image. Promotion then becomes more authentic, cost-effective, and faster than that existed in the pre-digital era. Thus paradigm shifts in the concept and practices of promotional activities become apparent and changes from the product orientation to tourist orientation, entrepreneurs’ control to social media users’ opinion dependent promotion, deliberately manufactured or reconstructed to authentic imaging occur logically. Asian destination promotion is not an exception to this trend. The present chapter focuses on the influences of technology on the transformation of destination promotional activity, its impacts, and challenges with an emphasis on the Asian perspective.