Identificación de la Percepción del Turista Hacia el Destino Cuenca-ecuador, Mediante la Netnografía

This research analyzes the need and convenience of demonstrating that Netnography is a method that contributes to the development of tourism, since it contributes to determine the tastes and preferences in relation to the resources/attractions existing in the locality and the level of satisfaction of the needs of consumers; the general objective is to identify attributes of the profile of tourists for the destination Cuenca, Ecuador and the methodology selected for the study was the one proposed by Vargas (2011), who establishes as steps of the procedure: the definition of the topic to be investigated, the virtual communities where the data will be extracted and finally, the interpretation of the information. The universe of the research integrated the totality of comments extracted from the Facebook page of Visit Cuenca Ecuador and the tourism forum of the city of Cuenca in Trip Advisor. The analysis resulted in the perception of tourists in relation to the attributes offered by the city, the existence of a greater influx of domestic tourism and segmentation of foreign tourists by origin, highlighting Latin America and the Caribbean; it is noted that the most important attraction in order of preference is the architectural area and the natural attractions of the environment; findings that may be taken into account for the design of future marketing strategies for the destination.