In 1998, the Scottish Tourist Board sought to "develop a 'real time' database covering all tourism products and services throughout Scotland through visitscotland.com'. Since then over £3m has been invested in this project with some 15,000 businesses and 17,500 products covering the whole spectrum of tourism business now searchable through the Web. The claim has been that there would be an increase in business being generated, initially with bookings through the more traditional channels such

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... telephone, fax, mail as well as e-mail and the there has also been the anticipation that the official national tourist board website would generate significant additional business. There have been little data to substantiate this viewpoint and this study sought to establish a methodology to derive preliminary baseline performance data in terms of tourism volumes, values and look-to-book ratios. The analysis provides tourism volume, value and conversion ratios which are compared with others available in the sector. The outcomes will be of interest to those concerned with the performance of tourism websites in general and destination-defined websites such as DMS.