Extending the modified heuristic usability evaluation technique to chain and independent hotel websites

Usability and functionality are the major elements which can significantly affect the performance of a website. While a number of prior studies have investigated the functionality of hotel websites, the usability issue has largely been overlooked in the existing hospitality literature. What is more, there is virtually an entire absence of published articles which compare and contrast website usability between chain and independent hotels. This paper presents a study that applied the modified heuristic evaluation technique to compute Usability Hazards Indices of hotel websites in Hong Kong. Experimental results showed that the hazard indices of chain hotels were significantly lower than the hazards indices of independent hotels. In other words, usability performance of chain hotels was significantly better than that of independent hotels. The possible explanations to this finding are likely due to the difference in financial support and the difference in operating scales between chain and independent hotels.