Travel Website Uses and Cultural Influence: A Comparison Between American and Chinese Travelers

Since the early 1990s, the applications of Internet technologies have led to a large group of users for information search and online purchase of travel-related products or services. Despite this growth, the existing academic literature has a very limited number of, if ever any, published articles that investigated whether website quality would have any relationships with customer satisfaction, which, in turn, can stimulate the purchase intention of Internet users. The lack of prior studies to investigate such relationships is particularly true in the context of cultural comparison. This article reports on a study that examined the relationships between various factors of website quality, satisfaction, and online purchase from the perspectives of travelers from the US and China. These two countries have the largest number of Internet users in the world, yet they exhibit different behaviors. A survey of 249 Chinese travelers and 238 American travelers was conducted in the restricted Departure Lounge area of the Hong Kong International Airport in October 2005. Empirical findings showed significant differences between these two groups of travelers in most attributes.