Clustering Tourism Data for Mapping Oman as Travel Destination

Abstract

Oman the Travel Destination’ is a marketing promotion campaign to position Oman as a unique and attractive tourist place. It aims to strengthen Oman’s profile as tourist destination and increase the volume of tourist traffic. Tourism business today is both an important and growing industry. It is becoming increasingly sophisticated, as evidenced by the abundance of information available on the web. The travelers today use web technology to plan their travel destination. Improved search engines and the increase in website traffic play an important role in availing competitive advantage among the varied segments and products that comprise the tourism industry. The first step of e-marketing is audience engagement. Surfers frequently switch to different pages in search of complete information, but visual tree has been found to be more effective in audience engagement as it gives comprehensive information at a glance. The surfers will also have better preview and ease in understanding thereby giving them more flexibility in discovering, using and reusing the available information. The main objective of this work is to promote Oman as a travel destination by building strong and attractive Brand 'Destination Oman'. This paper adapts Cluster analysis technique to develop a visual tree structure which describes relationships between different tourism services available in Oman. The developed visual tree structure provides a new marketing approach. It will act as a model and thus events or specific idea selling can be well established and published. The allied agencies, tourism marketing and hospitality industry will be able to bring all ideas and information on one platform. For this purpose, a set of selected web pages describing tourism in Oman have been clustered to design the special visual tree. This work shall be of great importance not only for Oman’s small and mediumsized tourism industry, but for marketing in general. It shall also be equally important for e-Tourism, e-Governance, e-Marketing, researchers, students and academicians.