Page 73 - Azerbaijan State University of Economics

THE JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC SCIENCES: THEORY AND PRACTICE, V.82, # 2, 2025, pp. 61-78

Ammedia -0.23 -0.13 Tmmedia 0.18 -0.41*
Asm -0.18 -0.17 Tsm 0.05 -0.27
A1smtype 0.12 -0.04 T1smtype -0.32 -0.03
Asevsmtype -0.18 -0.04 Tsevsmtype 0.23 -0.35

Significant correlations are marked with * (p<0.1) and ** (p<0.05).
Source: Compiled by the authors

The saturation point may start at the level of more than 60% share of enterprises using
a tool. Some tools below this value had significant effect on tourism exports. A good
option for accommodation sector is to pay to advertise on the internet possibly based
on the webpages' content, keywords, users' past activities or profile. At the same time,
using knowledge about geolocation of internet users provides a positive but
insignificant effect. But paid advertisements online for tourism companies again
provide no significant effect at the macro-level.

Instead, some social media tools used by tourism agencies provide a significant impact
(blog or microblogs by type of media, and using social media to exchange views, opinions
or knowledge within the enterprise as for purpose). At the same time, social media used by
accommodation sector provide no significant effect on tourism exports at the macro-level.

The regression model for accommodation sector is TEGDP=1.86+0.15Aadvtarg
2
R =0.33, p=0.02, N=16. When Malta is excluded the effect is smaller (b1=0.09) but
still significant (p=0.05). Therefore, increasing the share of accommodation
enterprises using targeted paid advertising online by 6-11% leads to increase of
tourism exports by 1% GDP.

The regression model for travel agencies and tour operators is TE=44.3+2.3Tsmopin
2
R =0.53, p=0.003, N=14. When Romania is excluded the effect is smaller (b1=1.8)
but still significant (p=0.0003). Therefore, increasing the share of travel agencies and
similar companies using social media to exchange views, opinions or knowledge
within the enterprise by 10% leads to an increase in tourism exports by 18-23%.

CONCLUSION
In 2015-2024 the trend towards digitalization of the EU tourism enterprises continued,
although some digital tools have already reached a saturation point (such as traditional
company websites and social networks). Increasingly more popular tools are
multimedia content sharing websites, combining several types of social media and
using geodata for targeting internet advertisements. There are also exceptions when
some digital marketing tools became less popular (traditional blogs or practice of
using only one type of social media). The trends largely varied by countries. Absence
of progress in digitalization in some destinations was partially due to reaching a
saturation point (such as 100% use of company websites in some countries).

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