A prototype architecture for effective online presence for the Kenyan tourism sector
Abstract
The success of social media channels, such as You'Tube, Flickr.and others, present an excellent
opportunity for the Kenyan tourism sector to increase the conversion rates of web traffic into
tangible bookings. The users of these channels generate huge volumes of content in the form of
micro-blogs, reviews, and ratings. This rich information source, often called User Generated
Content (UGC), is becoming increasingly plentiful.
The purpose of this thesis was to design and develop an adaptive web-based architecture that
gathers and mines various types of User Generated Content (UGC) to inform a websites content
and layout for a personalized and improved user experience. A prototype web application was
then developed to demonstrate the feasibility of the system architecture
Currently, major tourism sector players in Kenya are increasingly taking advantage of faster
internet speeds and the dominance of electronic commerce to get more tourism products
available online. However, effective utilization of web technologies to increase the conversion
rates of web traffic into tangible bookings remains a challenge. Although adaptive web
techniques offer opportunities for a persuasive online service delivery, there is little adoption of
these techniques in the Kenya tourism sector. The purpose of this thesis was to develop an
adaptive web-based architecture that gathers and mines various types of User Generated Content
(UGC) to inform a websites content and layout for a personalized and improved user experience.
A prototype web application was then developed to demonstrate the feasibility of the system
architecture.
An applied research design was employed because the objective of the research was to apply
science to address and answer a real-world problem. Literature review was used as a data collection methodology in the first part of this research where indicators and technologies related
to adaptive web and web personalization techniques were examined.
Through benchmarking the proposed prototype features against related websites in Kenya, the
research outcome indicated that it can provide a satisfactory online presence strategy and that it
can be a model for tourism actors seeking to identify components necessary for creating
competitiveness in tourism websites now and in the future.