This study evaluates the top 100 hotel websites from Web Content Accessibility Guideline 2.0 based on conformance level AA to understand their compliance with the international accessibility ...standards for disabled people. The study utilizes an automatic online tool - TAW, to check the web accessibility of hotels. The findings demonstrate that the hotel websites have accessibility barriers that prevent disabled people from using the online facility, especially in the guidelines 1.1, 2.4, 4.1, 1.3 and 1.4. Additionally, the study has also discussed various theoretical and practical implications that can help promote inclusive tourism.
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to develop a useful, effective and comprehensive approach to facilitate the evaluation of hotel websites.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper examines the ...literature evaluating e-commerce sites, particularly that is focused on hotel, tourism and travel. Moreover, 5 criteria and 19 sub-criteria are identified, and a two-step method is proposed for the assessment of hotel websites whereby the global weights of the proposed criteria are determined by the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process, and hotel websites are ranked through the fuzzy technique for order preference by similarity to ideal situation.
Findings
The results show that the leading criteria to effectively evaluate hotel websites are trust and information quality and that the most important sub-criteria are special discounts, assurance and reservation information.
Practical implications
This research offers practical advice to increase understanding of the determinants of an effective hotel website so that appropriate strategies can be developed to convert a website visitor into a customer.
Originality/value
The study aims to contribute to businesses operating in the tourism sector which seeks to increase the effectiveness of their websites by identifying criteria and proposing a methodology for hotel website evaluation.
Website quality of luxury hotels (from 4-star to 5-star ranking) is a vital role to attract customer's first impression, satisfaction, engagement behaviors, and loyalty intentions.
the study aims to ...increase the number online bookers by boosting the level of customer satisfaction and customer engagement behaviors (CEBs) on e-service of up-scale hotel websites in Vietnam. Moreover, this study examines whether mediation relationships between website quality, customer satisfaction, and CEBs.
the 332 online bookers fulfilled the survey via online and offline approaches. The PLS-SEM analysis applied to measure the relationship of the constructs.
The study confirms that website service quality contributes to customer satisfaction, then influences their CEBs and brand loyalty. Additionally, customer satisfaction acts as a partial mediation on the relationships between hotel website service quality and CEBs in the hotel industry.
besides the results of the new insights of hotel website studies, this research is one of the pioneering studies concentrating on the impact of consumer engagement behaviors on its site, satisfaction and loyalty intention in the hotel and tourism industry. The study supports the business of e-commerce and operation of hotel/tourism service, marketing and research.
It is essential for hotel marketers to better understand how human images—found in website photographs—are perceived by customers, and how such perceptions can affect customers’ website experience ...and behavioral intentions. Given the lack of empirical studies related to the effects of human images and hotel website photographs, this study first assesses the influence of physical and social attraction evaluations—related to human images in hotel website photographs—on perceived social presence, in order to further examine the relationships between social presence, sociability, and booking intentions. Moreover, the moderating effects of background homophily, on the relationships between physical and social attraction and social presence, are also examined. This study, which adopts structural equation modeling and analyzes data collected from a sample of 417 U.S. travelers who have recently booked a hotel room directly through a hotel website, confirms all of the aforementioned relationships.
Purpose
This study aims to contribute to the context of electronic trust (e-trust) research with an emphasis on the determination of tourists’ e-trust in hotel websites. This research used social ...exchange theory to elaborate how perceived attributes of a hotel website influence purchase behaviour of tourists. This area is often neglected because most studies focus on website users’ adoption or acceptance of other service industries. It is expected that trust-generating mechanisms have different impacts on the e-trust level in the hospitality services.
Design/methodology/approach
A comprehensive literature review identified the major antecedents and outcomes of e-trust. Data was collected from an online survey and 586 usable questionnaires were achieved. Structural equation modelling was used to examine the hypothesized model.
Findings
The results of this study demonstrated that the more tourists perceive influences positively, the more they are possibly to trust in hotel website. Findings revealed that perceptions about the attributes of hotel website, including security, privacy, usefulness, ease of use and compatibility are the main antecedents of trust in hotel website, which, in turn, lead to actual usage of the website for booking online.
Originality/value
This study is based on a large sample of tourists and broadens the understanding of e-trust in hotel websites by considering factors rarely discussed in prior tourism and hospitality literature.
PurposeThis paper aims to investigate the temporal dynamics of users browsing activity on a hotel website in order to derive effective marketing strategies and constantly improve website ...effectiveness. Users' activities on the hotel's website on yearly, monthly, daily and hourly basis are examined and compared, demonstrating the power of informatics and data analytics.Design/methodology/approachA total of 29,976 hourly Weblog files from 1 August 2014 to 31 December 2017 were collected from a luxury hotel in Hong Kong. ANOVA and post-hoc comparisons were used to analyse the data.FindingsUsers' browsing behaviours, particularly stickiness, on the hotel website differ on yearly, monthly, daily and weekly bases. Users' activities increased steadily from 2014 to 2016, but dropped in 2017. Users are most active from July to September, on weekdays, and from noon to evening time. The month-, day-, and hour-based behaviours changed through years. The analysis of big data determines strategic and operational management and marketing decision-making.Research limitations/implicationsUnderstanding the usage patterns of their websites allow organisations to make a range of strategic, marketing, pricing and distribution decisions to optimise their performance. Fluctuation of website usage and level of customer engagement have implications on customer support and services, as well as strategic partnership decisions.Originality/valueLeveraging the power of big data analytics, this paper adds to the existing literature by performing a comprehensive analysis on the temporal dynamics of users' online browsing behaviours.
Malaysian hotel websites have received many online visitors but failed to convert it into online booking. Based on a synthesis of literature, this article illustrates a conceptual business model to ...enhance customer intention to revisit hotel websites to book for hotel rooms. The conceptual model proposes that customer perception on hotel website interactivity influences customer perceived value and intention to revisit the hotel website in the future. This article contributes to the existing body of knowledge by highlighting the importance of each dimension of perceived website interactivity in hotel sector. Its applications in the hospitality business and implications for future research were also discussed.
This study analyzes the features offered by the websites of the top 100 independent hotels on four continents, as listed in Travel + Leisure in 2010. The study demonstrates the application of a ...modified extended Model of Internet Commerce Adoption (eMICA) technique for technical depth and content analysis for breadth as well as inferential statistics and perceptual mapping. The study assesses the presence of fifty-nine website features on the hotels’ websites grouped according to the three eMICA stages of promotion, provision, and processing and also grouped in seven dimensions determined by the content analysis, namely, functionality, innovation, interactivity, marketing, navigation, online processing, and service. The results of website evaluation modeling suggest that (1) hotels in Asia have more of the features than those of the other continent, (2) Europe and Asia were the leading continents in website development depth based on the eMICA model, and (3) each continent’s webpages were distinct as follows: (a) European hotel webpages emphasized online and multilanguage support, (b) Asian sites emphasized on real-time interaction services and privacy policies, (c) Africa’s pages emphasized travel tips and weather information services, and (d) American hotel webpages led in Web 2.0 features.
Hotel websites are vital information channels for potential customers. Hence, their readability and attractiveness play a key role in online marketing for hotels. This study attempts to investigate ...how hotels use language strategies to better market themselves online. This study first proposes an analytical framework on the basis of appraisal theory, which aims to reveal the hidden mechanism by hotels in building interpersonal relationships, and uses such a framework to explore online language strategies used by five-star hotels in China. The general language strategy and the corresponding preference in the use of such a strategy amongst hotels are identified. Theoretical contributions and managerial implications are generated on the basis of the findings and analysis. It is among the early studies to modify appraisal theory to analyze tourism and hospitality text data and to adopt the corpus approach to explore the hidden mechanism of language use.
This research focuses on the specific information present on a hotel website and an online travel agency (OTA) hotel page, and to identify what information relates to which customer value. A ...checklist, based on the combination of OTA consumption values and the six information dimensions, has been used in this research study in which two hotels are included. The hotels differ in size, location and brand. The results show that OTA content has a perfect score half of the time, where hotel websites only reach this in 10% of the ten researched clusters. Hotel website content outperforms OTA content only in company information and visibility clusters. The results are the basis for further research to determine the importance of each dimension's presence on the website from the customer's perspective to nudge a customer to book the next stay via the hotel website.
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