Evaluating Destination Marketing Organizations' Websites

Abstract

Developing their e-marketing strategy, Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs) invest in the establishment of their Websites to provide extended accessibility, real-time information/services, and personalization capabilities. This chapter aims to review prior tourism studies that refer to Website evaluation by taking DMOs' Websites as the focus of the investigation. A comprehensive literature review on theories, models, and surveys on evaluating tourism Websites is presented and analyzed. The major benefit of this study is the digest of multiple approaches regarding DMOs' Website evaluation within the tourism sector. The chapter gives an integrated overview of the historical development of Website evaluation studies in the tourism field in order to draw conclusions about the dimensions and key factors that drive Website success. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the DMOs' Websites of five Mediterranean countries are assessed through content analysis in terms of information, communication, transaction, relationship, and technical merit dimensions based on a modified approach of the ICTRT model (Li & Wang, 2010). The research findings should be of interest to DMOs as the findings shed light on the effectiveness of their Websites over a period of time facilitating continuous improvements and comparisons between competitive tourism destinations/countries.