A study of the functionality of hotel websites in mainland China and the United States

Journal of the Academy of Business and Economics,  Jan, 2004  by Rob Law,  Daniel Ho,  Catherine Cheung

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3.2 Data Collection

The first phase of data collection was carried out in Hong Kong using a questionnaire. By a convenience sampling in late-2002, the questionnaires were distributed to fifty hotel customers, who had experience in using hotel websites. Thirty-eight usable questionnaires were received. In this phase, the respondents were requested to rank their perception of the importance of all dimensions and their attributes. For instance, each respondent was asked to rank the importance of the ten attributes from 1 to 10 in the dimension of Reservations Information. Using hotel customers to rank the dimensions and attributes can actually enhance the descriptive capability of the model, as the original approach proposed by Law and Chung (2003) and Chung and Law (2003) only used hotel practitioners to evaluate the model.

The second phase of data collection was carried out in February to April 2003, between 8:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. (Hong Kong Time). At this stage, secondary data were collected from the Internet. Since hotel websites are updated regularly, data were collected within a short period of time in order to retrieve consistent information for fair comparison. Two researchers evaluated the selected hotel websites by assigning a value to each of the thirty-nine attributes using a five-point judgmental rating scale, by adopting the questionnaire used in the first phase. Wan's (2002) two independent evaluation processes were applied to detect and eliminate potential bias or misinterpretation. In addition, to avoid unnecessary extra variability, the same computer hardware configuration, Internet Service Provider (ISP), and Internet Brower were used throughout the entire period of data collection.

3.3 Importance Rating

On the basis of the collected data, a mean score was calculated for each attribute. In order to reflect a weighted value of importance for further analysis, the mean of the attribute was transformed to a weighted score in the following way (equation 1):

n = Number of attributes in a dimension

[M.sub.i] = The mean score for attribute i for i = 1,2, ... n

[W.sub.i] = Weighing Score of attribute i

W i = (1 + n - Mi)/[n.summation over j = 1] M j ... (1)

3.4 Performance Rating

The performance of each attribute was defined as the measurement of the richness of the information in the attribute. A score of performance was used to indicate the performance of the attribute. To facilitate the elements of customer perception, the score was calculated by combining the average weighted score and the score of the attributes of the website. The score of performance was then multiplied by 20 in order to transform the score from a 5-point scale to a commonly used 100-point scale. This calculation is presented in equation 2.

[W.sub.i] = Weighing Score of attribute i

[S.sub.i] = The mean of the ith attribute score for i = 1, 2, ... n

[P.sub.i] = Performance Score of attribute i

[P.sub.i] = 20 x [W.sub.i] x [S.sub.i] ... (2)

4. FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION