Zeszyty Naukowe Uniwersytetu Szczecińskiego. Service Management

The process of tourism experiences is usually initiated by images of a particular region formed by people before the intended journey. Searching for information about this region is often the second stage in this process. Nowadays, the contents available in the Internet play a very important role both at the stage of  forming the images and at the stage of searching for information.  Growing popularity of social media enables people to interact with each other, thus tourists may not only have access to objective facts but also to subjective opinions on the region itself and on what is going on there. There is however, still a segment of tourist product consumers, who will search for information about a particular region on its official websites rather than in social media. It results not only from  limited abilities of older generation consumers to function in social media, but also from the nature of tourist visit in the region.  For a big city inhabitant, who takes a spontaneous decision to spend a weekend in a nearby commune offering recreation or cultural attractions, it is easier to get the required information about tourist attractions, accommodation etc. on a well-structured official website of the commune than to follow a vast number of  posts and comments in social media. Information that is easily accessible, regularly updated and most of all useful for the potential tourists will certainly affect the image of the commune that is formed in the tourist’s mind. The overall objective of this research is to analyze the way in which the contents presented on the official website of  Czosnów commune are correlated with tourism image hallmarks of the commune. Therefore, the first initial part of the research deals with the identification of strong  image hallmarks serving as a basis for image formation before the intended visit. The core part of the research focuses on analyzing the official website contents in terms of the identified image hallmarks’ presence and contexts in which they are presented. The practical objective of the research is to analyze the contents’ usefulness for the potential tourists forming their image of the commune or searching for information before the intended visit.