Abstract

For the past 15 years, mostly in the context of raising the financing volume for the rural environment, the number of rural boarding houses has been expanding exponentially. This increase has failed yet to be correlated with efficient marketing solutions, the development itself happened rather through actions defined by an intuitive nature. Within rural tourism, the brands have not reached their peak potential for appealing to the tourists’ interest and growth. Although there are clear signs of an obvious evolution in the culture of promotion, there is also noticeable that digital technologies are not fully employed in building the brands of the rural boarding houses. In the context of the current competitional environment, the virtual presence is a necessary term for having visibility, constant audience, and also a must-have for increasing the tourists’ number, all indispensable elements for successfully running this type of business. Although the contemporary evolution of technologies has a high degree of unpredictability which forces the boarding houses to appeal to creative solutions for maintaining and developing the brand, there is still possible to identify a series of strategic approaches of the digital technologies, depending on certain predictable parameters linked to issues such as audience psychology, cultural context, aesthetical determinations of the environments, accessibility, usability, efficiency of broadcasting the message. A likely solution for such a strategical approach is given by the integrated web systems. An integrated web system serves as a technology-centered on web product whose functions are expanded and improved by other technologies which may be either digital or non-digital. This study addresses mainly the owners of boarding houses who intend to develop their brands and suggests a few practical solutions for successfully implementing the integrated web systems which best characterize their spectrum of activities. The solutions introduced here contain practical directions for the construction of a site, its integration in social media, and in a promotional package. Starting from the current offers in the market of digital technologies we also present a cost analysis for implementing the above-suggested technologies.