A Study of Information Richness and Downloading Time for Hotel Websites in Hong Kong

Abstract

It is generally agreed that a hotel website is created for attracting business. Adding visual materials such as images and multimedia files can enrich the website’s content and enable a visitor to better understand the hotel. However, the more visual materials that are put on the website, the longer the download time. This study analyzed 102 Hong Kong hotel websites’ home pages. Empirical findings showed that economy hotels had fewer image files than their luxury counterparts but the total file size of the former group was much larger than the latter. Moreover, most luxury hotels used script programs to handle sophisticated web functions such as member login and room availability; whereas only half of the economy and mid-priced hotels used script. In general, the difference on average web page size between luxury hotels and economy hotels was only lOOKBytes (371KB and 271KB). Luxury hotels, however, contained an average of 47 objects and economy class hotels only contained 18 objects. As a result, when download speed is considered, the number of objects is not the major factor, but file size needs to be measured carefully.