The Use of Internet as a Marketing Tool - Evaluating the Websites of Spain's Top Restaurants

Abstract

The haute cuisine catering sector in Spain is faced with two facts that underscore the importance today of their presence on the Internet. On the one hand, the quality and recognition of Spanish cuisine are fostering the development of culinary tourism, both domestic in origin and from abroad. And on the other, an ever greater proportion of tourists are using the Internet to obtain information and make decisions about activities to include in their trips. Given this context, the present work describes a comparative analysis of the Websites of Spanish restaurants which have at least one Michelin star in order to assess the quality of those Web pages and provide some guidance to their designers to facilitate their use as a marketing tool. The instrument used is the Web Assessment Index (WAI). This has been validated in other studies in the literature, and measures the quality of a Website based on 4 dimensions: visibility, speed, navigability, and content. The results showed the quality of the Website to be positively correlated with the category of the corresponding restaurant.