Opportunities for endearment to place through electronic 'visiting': WWW homepages and the tourism promotion of Scotland

For the Internet to realise its full marketing potential a communication concept may be needed in the design of Web sites and their management by tourism businesses. This is the transposing of the concept of 'endearment' from actual to electronic visiting. This paper appraises tourism Web sites in Scotland to see how far such a concept has been developed. It also considers the drivers to the adoption of information processing by tourism businesses in Scotland, and the constraints emerging on this. The regional diversity of sites across Scotland is identified and the extent of the development of a communication concept is assessed. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.