How the online presence of a tourist destination affects the country brand. The Case of Lithuania

Master's Thesis from the year 2016 in the subject Tourism - Miscellaneous, grade: 1.3, Stralsund University of Applied Sciences (Faculty of Business Studies), course: Tourism Development Strategies, language: English, abstract: This thesis is aimed to test a hypothesis of the country brand's reliance on the online presence. The created evaluation model used in the primary research of this paper determines whether there is enough evidence in the data gathered to indicate that the online presence of a tourist destination corresponds to its country brand's rank. The research is focused on the online presence of Lithuania as a weak ranking country brand. The online presence results of Lithuania as a tourist destination are compared to the examples of two stronger country brands. The conclusions derived from the comparison of the results determine the success of the online presence of Lithuania, establish whether the hypothesis of the thesis is true or not, while noting the limitations and possible errors of the research, and provide the suggestions for the country brand and online presence improvements.