Usability of Travel Websites: A Case Study of the Perceptions of Hong Kong Travelers

Abstract

ABSTRACT The wide-scale application of Internet technology has led to intense competitions in the travel and tourism industry for online reservations. Unfortunately, the issue of the usability on travel websites has been largely overlooked in the literature on hospitality and tourism. This paper reports on a study on the perceptions of Hong Kong travelers towards Hong Kong-based travel agency websites (hereafter known as travel websites). The expectancy disconfirmation theory was used to compare the expected performance and experienced performance of attributes of usability. The empirical results indicated that there were significant differences between perceived performance and expected performance, with the largest gap being in “Information Architecture.”