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.