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Website Evaluation Frameworks: A Review of the Hospitality and Tourism Field from 1996 to 2019

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Handbook of e-Tourism

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Abstract

This chapter provides a collection, review, and summary of 20 years of website evaluation studies in hospitality and tourism by adapting a scientometrics approach and content analysis. Seventy-four research articles related to travel website evaluation from 1996 to 2019 were collected from Web of Science, and the collected studies were categorized into four groups based on the methods that the articles employed for website evaluation: analysis of consumer and practitioner views; mathematical evaluation; software automated evaluation; and manual computation. The chapter shows that over the last two decades, website evaluation methods and research priorities have changed: early website evaluation studies focused more on features, functions, and the content of the traditional provider website, and recent studies have focused more on the richness of website content and interaction with users or compare the content of different types of websites. The chapter provides a comprehensive overview and summary of existing methods for evaluating tourism-related websites, serving as an important reference for the future development of tourism websites and related research topics.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Tourism Management, Macao Institute for Tourism Studies, Macao, China

    Shanshan Qi

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  1. Shanshan Qi
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Correspondence to Shanshan Qi .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. The Howard Feiertag Department of Hospitality and Tourism Management, Pamplin College of Business, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA

    Zheng Xiang

  2. Department of Economics, Geography, Law and Tourism, The European Tourism Research Institute, Mid-Sweden University, Östersund, Jämtland, Sweden

    Matthias Fuchs

  3. Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Ulrike Gretzel

  4. Institute for Digital Transformation, Ravensburg-Weingarten University of Applied Sciences, Weingarten, Germany

    Wolfram Höpken

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Qi, S. (2022). Website Evaluation Frameworks: A Review of the Hospitality and Tourism Field from 1996 to 2019. In: Xiang, Z., Fuchs, M., Gretzel, U., Höpken, W. (eds) Handbook of e-Tourism. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48652-5_49

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