Comparative evaluation study of the websites of China-based and international luxury hotels.

Abstract

Practitioners in the hotel industry constantly seek ways to improve their online and offline presence to improve their competitiveness and profitability. Consumers from different countries differ in their preferences for color, pictures, navigation, and site structure, which affect the performance of hotel websites. To connect industry efforts with consumer requirements, this study adopted a website usefulness framework to compare the websites of China-based luxury hotels with those of international luxury hotels. A fuzzy model was applied to analyze the data collected from online users. Findings of this study will be utilized to assess the perceptions of Chinese and international users and to compare the performance of the websites of China-based luxury hotels with those of international luxury hotels. Results show that Chinese and international consumers significantly differ in their perception of the usefulness performance of China-based and international luxury hotel websites.