Improving Digital Marketing Strategies in the Tourism Services Market: A Customer-Journey Framework and Evidence from Uzbekistan

Tourism demand is recovering strongly, while the search, booking and sharing behaviour of travellers has moved largely online. Destinations and tourism firms therefore compete for attention in digital channels, yet many strategies remain collections of separate tools rather than managed customer-journey systems. This article develops a five-stage digital marketing framework (inspiration, planning, booking, experience, sharing) with a foundation layer of data governance and a feedback loop of measurement, and applies it to Uzbekistan. The study is a conceptual synthesis of 15 scholarly sources combined with a descriptive analysis of published secondary statistics from UN Tourism, DataReportal and the National Statistics Committee of Uzbekistan (as reported by the national press). The data show that global international arrivals reached about 1.52 billion in 2025 (+4%), that Uzbekistan reported a preliminary 11.7 million foreign visitors (+46.8%), that roughly 82% of these came from five neighbouring countries (author’s calculation from rounded figures), and that internet penetration in Uzbekistan (89.0%) exceeds the world average (73.2%) while social-media user identities are lower (37.9% versus 68.7%). The article derives five propositions on source-market diversification, channel mix, journey-based measurement, review management and privacy-compliant data use, and an 18-month implementation roadmap. The propositions are not empirically tested; the article proposes a measurement design for testing them.