Analyzing a hotel website's access paths

Irrespective of content richness and user friendliness of a website, customers may not access the website if they cannot easily find their desired information. At present, the existing tourism and hospitality literature has a limited number of, if any, prior studies that examined users’ accessed paths when browsing websites. This study analyzed the web server log of a Hong Kong fivestar international chain hotel in the period May 2006 to Apr 2007. The log contained 597,269 visitors and 2,655,661 pages of view data. The main focus of this study was to analyze the information retrieved by visitors and their access paths. Empirical results showed that the majority of the visitors were local residents, and dining information was their primary interest. This implies that the visibility of a website in search engine was relatively low so that only local residents that know the hotel name can find the website. Moreover, this hotel information structure was not very well-organized as visitors took an average of 3.94 clicks to reach the page that contained their desired information.