In this essay we discuss the broad area of website usability from a tourism perspective. Our goal was to investigate the usability in smaller and bigger tourism websites. We have declared what website usability means and the importance of involving the users when designing a user interface. In a pilot study, we conducted three interviews with people who work with usability and then used the information we got to form questions to use in a focus group interview. In this focus group, we asked three people to assess two Swedish tourism websites, one bigger and one smaller, to find out if they were considered usable and if there was any difference in usability depending on the size of the site.

SammanfattningRubrikFrom Sea, Sand, Sun and Sex to Death, Disaster och Deprivation-etiska överväganden vid utformningen av marknadskommunikation för dark tourism företagProblemTurism är en marknad under kontant utveckling vilket leder till att nya nischer utvecklas inom branschen för att tillfredställa kunders ökade krav. En av dessa underkategorier är dark tourism. Denna företeelse grundar sig i ett intresse att besöka platser som varit med om katastrofer. Att kommersialisera och exploatera död är ett kontroversiellt område och av många anser att denna sorts turism är oetisk. Det gäller för företag som arbetar med dark tourism att utforma marknadskommunikation som inte uppfattas som felaktig i kunders ögon.

I många år har människor jorden runt varit fascinerade av skräck och någonting som gett dem en adrenalinkick eller känsla av sorg. Därför har många spännande sevärdheter uppkommit, som exempelvis London Dungeons och Auschwitz. Detta har blivit en ny trend i turismen och har utvecklats väldigt mycket utomlands; människor vill betala för att se och ta del av elände och misär. Det lockar många olika grupper av åskådare, främst skolgrupper men även enskilda personer som vill veta mer om historian bakom platsen. Detta är även ett stort intresse hos oss (Amera och Elin) och blev därmed ett självklart val när vi bestämde oss för att utföra denna studie.Syftet med föreliggande studie är att belysa förutsättningarna för att utveckla brun turism i Halmstad.

Öland?s Business Office is on the verge of developing a strategy for the island?s future tourism. Before any work with developing Öland can be carried out, it is essential to gain an understanding of how the place is perceived today.The purpose of this essay is to study the island?s current image and make recommendations for how the place brand could be developed.The methods used are literature studies and qualitative group interviews. The participants have been inhabitants of Öland and returning visitors from the Kalmar region.

Tourism and Hospitality Management.

Background: Today, the tourism sector is one of the economically fastest growing sectors in the world. Volunteer travel is a type of service that is gaining in popularity and a number of tour operators organize these trips. Few aid agencies engaged in volunteer activities and therefore the interest in volunteer travel is caught by tour operators. These tourists travel in small groups and interact with locals. Today fifty million children in Africa are orphaned and Africans struggling with the care of these children by founding orphanages.Research questions:What does volunteers contribute with during their stay at orpahanges?What view does volunteers and orphanages have on volunteer tourism?Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the positive and the negative effects that volunteer tourism contributes to orphanages.Method: The study is based on a qualitative approach with semi-and unstructured interviews, observations, and email interviews.

This thesis presents a research of Swedes view on sex tourism in Thailand. This research is showing how Swedes sees sex tourism in Thailand and what kind of thoughts they have about it. This research also shows the Swedish view on sex tourism in Thailand and how it differs from the view of the Swedish media and their opinion about the subject. Furthermore, this research shows that the view of this subject differs depending on the respondents? experience of travelling in Thailand.

This paper is the result of a study of competition and cooperation in regard to tourism between the five largest municipalities in Norrland in northern Sweden. The municipalities are Luleå, Skellefteå, Umeå, Sundsvall and Gävle. The aim was to study the relation between competition and cooperation between these municipalities. An important theoretical aspect in this study is coopetition, where competition and cooperation occur at the same time. The studies on coopetition in the Nordic kontext is limited and the main literature on coopetition study the relationship between firms. This study however takes a geographical standpoint and aims to fill the gap in the literature on how competition and cooperation are connected to each other between chosen municipalities. To do this the tourism strategies of the municipalities were studied thoroughly. These written strategies provided information about how the municipalities view their competitive advantages and disadvantages and some general information about how they cooperate with the nearest regions. To find out how the municipalities think about competition and cooperation with the other four specific municipalities interviews were made with experts on the tourism field in each municipality. The results show that the municipalities do not have established strategies for how they are to be competitive compared with other specific municipalities. They do not see it as profitable to compete, instead they should complement each other. At the same time however, most of the municipalities mostly cooperate with municipalities in a short distance from them, and due to lack of resources only briefly or not at all with the municipalities studied here..

Kina är idag en av världens ledande ekonomier och placerar sig på andra plats gällande landets BNP. Under de senaste åren har tillväxten av Kinas turistnäring ökat i en snabb takt. En av de bidragande faktorerna bakom detta är att regler och gränser har luckrats upp och ger kineserna möjlighet att besöka allt fler destinationer världen över. Från år 2000 till 2012 har Kinas utrikesturism ökat från 10 miljoner resor till 83 miljoner. Med sin stadiga årliga befolkningstillväxt beräknar UNWTO, United Nations World Tourism Organization, att 100 miljoner kineser kommer att resa redan innan år 2015.

Today?s climate research shows that the climate may increase its temperature. One sector that is being threatened by global warming is the winter tourism of the Swedish municipality A?re. Tourism is an important economical source of income in A?re and is now threatened by a shortened winter season.

Pictures are often used when marketing a tourist destination. Photographs of a place, a destination, are used to convince customers and stimulate daydreaming in order to turn a potential customer into a real customer. For some people the photographic representations of a place is the only one they experience. With this in mind, it is reasonable to question how representations of places and geographical imaginations are being (re)produced when marketing a destination by using photographs. This paper aims to study how representations of place and people are used when marketing a tourist destination via travel commercial.

Our purpose with this thesis was to study how tourism providers deliver quality to their customers. We chose to carry out two case studies where we interviewed an owner of a camp site, and a municipal manager employed at another camp site. The questions were based on customer needs, service quality and dissatisfaction. The study gave us some useful aspects. The respondents told us that it was very important to the tourist providers to listen to the customer´s specific needs and to give them personal attention.

In this study environmental work in the Swedish hotel chain "Scandic" is investigated. Earlier studies point out sustainability and different environmental certificate programs as essential for the housing sector to contribute to sustainable tourism. The purpose and willingness to fulfill such a mission has been investigated by interviewing central actors in the hotel chain. The result shows that there is a desire to be part of environmental certificate programs mainly for the reason to be part of the system and not for the benefit of nature. Sustainable development is understood as being environmentally friendly. Different solutions to adapt and being more environmentally friendly is discussed.

This essay is inspired by an earlier essay written in 2012 by Sanna Johansson and Erika Winther. In their essay they examined Sweden?s municipalities? tourist websites and graded these based on a number of Web 2.0 criterias. In this essay we examine tourist websites belonging to the 15 most popular tourist destinations in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales and Ireland. The purpose of this study is to give a general overview of how far these countries? tourist websites have come in terms of web development, in relation to Web 2.0.

This paper intends to show how micro- and small businesses in the tourism and experience industry makes use of social media as a marketing tool. The study also shows the possibilities for businesses to market themselves to customers through social media. Small businesses usually don?t have the same conditions or the same marketing resources that larger companies have. For small businesses that lack marketing resources, social media is a great addition to marketing since the technology around social media is relatively simple.