Evaluating Reservation Facilities for Hotels: A Study of Asian Based and North American Based Travel Web Sites.

This paper reports on a study about examining online hotel reservation services in travel web sites. Using a semi-systematic approach, 60 travel web sites, half are Asian based and the other half are North American based, are evaluated to determine their level of service provisions. The attributes selected for evaluations fall into 2 major categories: i) availability of various online hotel reservation facilities, and ii) user friendliness of online hotel reservations. Experimental results of a content based analysis indicate that the Asian based and the North American based travel web sites have achieved different outcomes, and that the North American based web sites outperform their Asian counterparts significantly in certain dimensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]