Assessing the Determinants of the Success of Web-based Marketing Strategies by Destination Marketing Organizations in the United States Youcheng Wang Daniel R. Fesenmaier National Laboratory for Tourism and eCommerce University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign {ywang13, drfez}@uiuc.edu Abstract Internet marketing is becoming an inseparable, oftentimes determining part of destination marketing organizations’ (DMO) overall marketing efforts. This study attempts to contribute to the understanding of DMOs’ Internet marketing strategies by examining the Web marketing practices of the DMOs in the United States. The results of a path analysis indicate that both hierarchical and nested relationships exist between the three groups of variables included in the study: 1) organizational characteristics (i.e., innovativeness and organizational size) and organization technology climate (i.e., management support and organization Internet literacy); 2) Web marketing strategies (including Web technology application, website marketing strategy, and website promotion strategy); and 3) the overall successfulness of Web marketing strategy. Discussion and implications are provided based on the study results. Keywords: Internet marketing; destination marketing organization; tourism marketing 1 Introduction The importance of information technology in tourism, especially the World Wide Web, has increased tremendously in the past decades, and more and more companies have realized that Internet marketing is becoming an inseparable, oftentimes a determining part of their overall marketing endeavor. As a result, marketing and advertising on the Internet is increasing in importance and impact. For example, Internet advertising spending in 1999 was $2 billion to $3 billion in the US alone (eMarketer, 1999), and this figure is expected to rise to $22 billion by 2004, with the Internet surpassing most of the traditional advertising media (Rothenberg, 1999). The travel industry is one of the first areas doing business electronically (Copeland and Mckenny, 1998; Schultz, 1996), and significant transformation has taken place in the travel industry. Today, tourism is among the most important application domains in the World Wide Web (WWW) where estimates of between 33% and 50% of Internet transactions are tourism-based (Strassel, 1997). In responding to this new media and purchasing patterns, destination marketing organizations (DMOs) are trying to adjust their marketing strategies by integrating the Internet for destination marketing and promotion (Schmid, 1994; Werthner, 1996). However, many questions