Performance Evaluation of Commercial Web Sites: An Exploratory Study of Hotels in Mainland China

To establish a valuable Website is a big challenge facing many service firms of China. This research evaluated the hotels' Websites in Mainland China from a functionality perspective. Three categories (state-owned, foreign-funded and private) of hotels were selected separately for study. Content analysis was used to analyze and compare the performance of these hotel Websites in terms of site design characteristics (interactivity, functionality and navigation) and marketing practices on Internet. The results showed that domestic brand hotels were not utilizing the Internet to its full potential and effective e-marketing compared to international brand hotels. Corresponding suggestions for hoteliers and future research were provided in the end.