Web Presence and Multilingual Management in the Tourism Sector: An Analysis of Active Tourism and Ecotourism Corporate Websites from Southern Spain

Abstract

The availability of a corporate website, specially if it is translated to other languages, can be a great ally for companies to reach international audiences at a very reduced cost. This is of paramount importance for business sectors highly dependent on international clients, which is the case of tourism, and for regions with strong tourism flows, such as Andalusia (Spain). The aim of this paper is to analyze the web presence and the multilingual dissemination of corporate information of Andalusian small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from two emerging tourism sectors: active tourism and ecotourism. To meet this aim, a sample of 343 companies has been analyzed via frequency analysis and decision trees. Results show that, despite the web presence of the analyzed companies being strong—nearly 80% of them had a website—most of them were lacking the competitive advantages of offering a translated website and, in the cases where translations were available, the language diversity was scarce.