A Comprehensive Evaluation Framework for Hotel Websites: The Case of Chain Hotel Websites Operating in Greece

Abstract

This article proposes a quantitative evaluation framework of all the dimensions provided by hotel websites. The proposed framework evaluates the richness of specific and comprehensive information. A proposed conceptual model that describes the hotel websites' features is used in order to summarize the data and consider how sound websites are in terms of technology and management. The model combines various dimensions (i.e., information attributes, website design attributes, reservation engine facilities, payment, provided services attributes, provided information attributes, quality of content, language support, website operating attributes, website structure, navigation, and search facilities). The proposed evaluation method is based on the websites evaluation by users/guests, hotel managers, and IT professionals, while it uses principal components analysis (PCA) to estimate the performance score from users/guests, hotel managers, and IT professionals as well the overall score of a website. Using this framework, we determine how each data dimension impacts on each performance indicator as well as on the overall performance. We applied our method and evaluated 30 chain hotel websites operating in Greece, and found interesting insights for the hotel chain industry in Greece.