A study of the functionality of hotel websites in mainland China and the United States

Journal of the Academy of Business and Economics, Jan, 2004 by Rob Law, Daniel Ho, Catherine Cheung

A similar study was conducted by Weeks and Crouch (1999), which examined the content of Australian-based tourism and hospitality websites. The approach adopted in the research was based on the content analysis of Murphy et al. (1996). The researchers had modified the features of the website to thirty-three attributes and classified them into four major categories. These features were then utilized to analyze one hundred and twenty websites in six tourism and hospitality sectors. Each sector was then compared to find similarities and differences in the items included in these sites. The empirical findings showed that the accommodation sector was less likely than other sectors to inform online visitors about other accommodation or tourism sites.

Law and Leung (2000) performed a content-based analysis to examine the web-based online reservation services of thirty airlines. Their study found that four dimensions contributed to a successful airline website. These included the availability of product information, the provision of extra benefits, the fast loading speed of web pages, and the existence of additional services and facilities to Internet customers. Attributes to evaluate efficiency were used to analyze the online reservation services of the airlines. The collected data were analyzed and compared among selected airlines in different regions. The results revealed that North American websites outperformed their European and Asian counterparts.

3. METHODOLOGY

The methodological approaches used in this study mainly followed the technique of measuring the incremental performance of websites (Law and Chung, 2003; Chung and Law, 2003) and content analysis (Morrison et al., 1999). In addition, both primary and secondary data were collected.

The purpose of this research is to evaluate the content of hotel websites in mainland China and the United States. The five dimensions proposed in Law and Chung's (2003) study were adopted for content analysis. These dimensions comprised Facilities Information, Customer Contact Information, Reservations Information, Surrounding Area Information, and Management of Website. Table 1 shows the framework of measuring a hotel's website. There were a total of 39 items in the questionnaire, which represented the perceptions of customers of the quality of hotel websites.

The research process was divided into three parts. The first part involved experienced users of hotel websites, who ranked the importance of the five dimensions and their associated attributes. The second part of the research computed weighted scores for all dimensions and attributes. Lastly, performance scores for all dimensions, as well as the overall scores for the hotel websites, are calculated.

3.1 Hotels Chosen for Analysis

In this research, a total of 60 hotel websites were selected for analysis: 30 hotels in Los Angeles and New York, the largest cities in the United States; and 30 hotels in Shanghai and Beijing, the largest cities in mainland China. The hotel websites were randomly selected from www.eexpedia.com, a major, fast-growing, and highly praised travel portal. Since lower-ranked hotels do not have enough resources to efficiently utilize the web, all of selected hotel websites were those that were three-star or above.