An exploratory study of the weather and calendar effects on tourism web site usage

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the weather and calendar effects on the usage pattern of a tourism web site. Design/methodology/approach – This paper analyses data from a yearlong web log involving 21,655,089 visitors to a popular tourism web site. The weather factors include rain, snow, cloud cover, and the calendar factors include seasons and holidays in order to test the proposed model. Findings – Using data from the Korea Tourism Organisation and the Korean Meteorological Administration, the results show that when it was rainy, cloudy, summer or a workday, the number of visitors to the tourism information web site was higher. Originality/value – The results provide managers involved in the tourism industry with useful insights for effective use of web sites by running them more efficiently and setting up appropriate marketing strategies in terms of the weather and calendar variables.