Optimizing Virtual Communities in Tourism to Facilitate Development of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises

Abstract

The chapter presents the essence of online/virtual travel communities and examines their current significance for SMEs. It presents types and characteristics as well as the most popular virtual travel SME communities and discusses ways of optimizing the development of SMEs by applying a strategy of virtual communities by selected hospitality SMEs. An eight step strategy to implement virtual travel communities by SMEs is elaborated. One of the main findings of the author is that virtual travel communities can be very useful for optimizing the development of SMEs by supporting all the stages in the decision-making process, focusing on pre-planning, making the decision and after the tourist and business visit stage. In order to understand how virtual travel community can optimize the development of SMEs, the author discusses tools for measuring the effectiveness of social media. Both future research directions and a conclusion are outlined.