The Application of the Data Envelopment Analysis for Tourism Website Evaluation

Abstract

Tourists are increasingly using the Internet for travel preparation and booking. At the same time tourism organizations are facing increased competition regarding their website offers. Therefore, the aim for tourism organizations and businesses should be to provide more efficient websites in order to gain competitive advantage. This study provides an example of how Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) can be used to assess the website’s efficiency of tourism organizations. Input criteria include the linguistic offer, interactivity, and tourism content, and output is defined by number of inquiries and number of website visits. It is argued that efficient organizations should be considered useful benchmarking partners for inefficient organizations in that best practices should be used to identify the potential for improvement.