Web Communication by Italian Tourist Ports: A Websites Quality Assessment Exercise

The economic relevance of nautical tourism is constantly growing, with the Mediterranean Sea being a major destination; Italy, in particular, has a long tradition in nautical tourism, as the large number of tourism ports reflects. As for most tourism companies, marketing communication is a critical activity for tourist ports; it is consequently worth investigating its quality, especially with respect to the use of websites. In our paper, the quality of 51 Italian tourist ports websites is evaluated using the 2QCV3Q model, a multi-purpose qualitative evaluation tool. The overall quality of Italian tourist ports websites results to be average, significantly lower than the score of a group of benchmark ports in the Mediterranean Sea and worldwide. Two distinct clusters of websites stand out, that respectively include well- and poorly-performing ones. Results suggest that Italian tourist ports websites require a significant improvement, especially as of their content and the services provided.