The tourism industry between real and digital world

The paper aims to provide a concrete understanding of the changes that have affected the tourism market. More specifically, the study applies the literature in etourism (Sheldon 1997, Werthner and Klein 1999, Longhi 2008, Hikkerova 2010) in order to ascertain how the structure of the tourism industry has been transformed and how it will continue to follow an evolutionary path. New companies have entered the market, existing ones have revised their strategies, consumers have become more sophisticated using the Internet as a tool for doing research and finding affordable deals. From the results of an online questionnaire (a quantitative study with 406 respondents of a random sample of Italian and American) made with the purpose to understand the characteristics and preferences of online customers, the paper provides empirical evidence of how the tourism industry can improve the virtual world on the basis of its experiences in the real world.