Benchmarking and quantitative evaluation of the functionality performance of hotel websites : a study of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China

At present, hotels have adopted e-commerce to achieve various business goals. In spite of general agreement on the importance of maintaining effective hotel websites, only a limited number of articles have been published in the field of hospitality and tourism on evaluating the performance of websites, and in the context of China. This paper reports and analyses the findings of a study that used a multi-criteria decision making approach to measure the functionality performance of hotel websites, in which the scores of functionality performance were computed by incorporating the derived weights and rating performance. The empirical findings showed significant differences in all dimensions and overall scores among different categories of hotels in Hong Kong. In general, the websites of luxury hotels received higher scores for performance than upscale hotels, which in turn, had higher scores than mid-priced hotels. Industrial practitioners will then no longer need to rely on navigation data or on line sales volume to determine the performance of their websites, especially in relation to their peers and as compared to the best industrial practices. Instead, they will know the relative standing of their websites based on quantitative performance scores.