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A new analysis system for website quality evaluation is presented. It is characterized by its potential to interrelate and evaluate both technical and strategic aspects of a website. It has its origin in the premise that, although the technical aspects, which determine the website operability and functionality, have a great impact on its quality, they do not alone guarantee success. This approach differs from those commonly adopted by analysis systems for website quality evaluation, since most of them have been developed adopting a predominantly operational or functional approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Website evaluation has been studied extensively in Information Systems and Tourism literature; but few studies combine information system issues with the Tourist decision making perspective. In this research we evaluate websites on a comprehensive set of criteria, based on five factors of website effectiveness. A Content analysis of official tourism websites of top ten tourist attracting nations was done and data was analysed using Correspondence analysis and weighted mean scores. Findings reveal that websites need to improve on certain factors, the two most important being Security and Responsiveness. In addition to this, websites should include features that support decision making at different stages of travel which would enhance website effectiveness. The study also discusses the implications for tourism organisations for developing websites that create destination image and attract tourists across the globe. The research contributes to the website evaluation approaches by developing a set of criteria using a tourist decision making perspective, rather than only technical, for evaluating website effectiveness. The research employs a novel approach of analysing cross national websites unlike other studies that have generally evaluated websites from a single country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has two research objectives. First, it adopts the Information, Communication, Transaction, Relationship, and Technical Merit model to evaluate Destination Marketing Organization (DMO) web sites from five East Asian countries. Second, it examines the relationship between website complexity and performance. The results indicate that the five selected DMO websites have not fully utilized information technology in their business operations. All five websites have performed reasonably well on the information and communication dimensions. However, three web sites perform poorly in the transaction dimension. Among the five selected countries, the Korean DMO's website received the highest score for effectiveness, followed by the Japanese, Thai, and Hong Kong websites. The Macau DMO's website received the lowest score for effectiveness. In addition to evaluating website effectiveness, this study found a linear relationship between website complexity and performance. Also there are significant performance variances among the DMOs' websites across different countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the background of the rapid development of information technology, the functions of tourist websites and tourists' needs are undergoing corresponding changes. It is of great significance to grasping the trend of the changes for the development of tourist websites. The paper makes a survey of 100 tourists and 75 China's 5A-rated websites in tourist attractions in 2005 and 2010 so as to obtain tourists' perceptions of the changes of evaluation indicators as well as changes of websites. Based on this, the authors analyze the changes of tourists' needs about tourists websites in tourists attractions and changes of websites applying internet technologies. Meanwhile, the paper, through the interrelative comparison of IPA method, makes an analysis of the changes of the development of tourist websites that keep pace with tourists' expectations and those that do not conform with their expectations. The paper furthermore elaborates problems existing in China's tourist websites in the past five years and future orientation for improvement. Finally, the paper also discusses the prospect for the application of these study results among academia and industrial circle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews website evaluation studies in the tourism and hospitality fields published between January 1996 and September 2009. A website evaluation framework that includes evaluation by phases, evaluation by features, and evaluation by features and effectiveness is developed. The strengths and weaknesses of each method of evaluation are analyzed, and research gaps and future research directions are explored. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This exploratory study was designed to develop an instrument for evaluation of websites using the modified balanced scorecard (BSC) and analytical hierarchy process (AHP), and compare its differences between the hospitality and tourism area. For the first step, the 4 evaluation perspectives and critical success factors (CSFs) were developed based on the modified BSC and a literature review. For the second step, a final website evaluation instrument was constructed through AHP. Through these processes, the final instrument was developed. The results indicated that the two CSFs—user-friendliness and user security—appeared to be the most important factors for hospitality and tourism website among CSFs. Also, customer perspective was the most important of the 4 perspectives. The present study will help broaden knowledge about website evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to help tourism organizations enhance customer satisfaction (CS) for their websites and online services, this study develops a two layer supply-demand analysis model for tourism websites CS evaluation. This model is built based on the functionalities of tourism websites, and it mainly focuses on the CS evaluations from successful tourism websites applications. A number of tourism online service websites in Beijing, China, are taken as study cases for measuring and analyzing the supply-demand difference of online services presented in the model. The model can be used in regional tourism management to identify issues regarding the activity characteristics of tourism websites and to obtain suggestions to both customer satisfaction and tourism website provider profit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]