Website Evaluation for the Local Tourism Offices of Indonesia’s Top 10 Priority Destinations

Abstract

The recent growth of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has a significant impact to people’s way of searching and processing information. Increasing number of travelers is using the internet to assist them in planning their journey especially as a source of information. This has made internet as an important destination marketing tool for travel & tourism organizations including local and national tourism offices. The aim of this study is to provide updated overview of the official websites of local tourism offices or local government in provincial and city or regency’s level in which Top 10 Priority Tourism Destination are located, based on the facilities and services offered by the websites. Subsidiary aim of this study is to determine the features that are used most frequently on the Local Tourism offices' websites. This study should be of interest to researchers, government official as well as industry professionals by applying the content analysis on the feature of tourism websites. The findings of the research will enable the local government official to understand how effective their websites in delivering information for the visitors. The results will assist them also in judging website performance against competitors so that they have useful information to facilitate continuous improvement on their own websites. The results indicated that official websites of the local tourism offices already provides sufficient general information regarding the destination; however it lacked facilities or features which allow visitor to interact more with the tourism office or even fellow visitors. The most frequent features available in the evaluated websites are Culture/history information which was the feature with highest percentage (77%) followed by Contact (email/fax) with (74%) Picture gallery and use of animated pictures were scored at (71%) and Newsletter at (68%), In the bottom of the list are Terms & Condition, Chatting/News Group, Virtual Postcard at (0%)or virtually non-existent. The results also show that local tourism offices still have much room for improvement in the term of using the internet to boost and maximize their destination marketing effort. It is recommended that local tourism offices significantly upgrade and modify their official websites into more efficient and effective marketing instrument to exploit the potential internet based market.

Measuring the Effectiveness of Zimbabwe Tourism Authority Website

“…The website is very effective in terms of communication followed by the information hinged on the effectiveness of the technical merit. No dimension scored 100% not even on single attribute being evaluated and this is supported by Subandi & Putra [14] who said there is no perfect website. Website effectiveness is affected by a number of factors such as finance, technology and knowledge of developers.…”

“…A list of items was identified for each of the five dimensions based on an extensive literature review mainly grounded in DMO website evaluation [8,11,14,20,21]. The performance and importance of the 47 items in the mentioned five dimensions were measured on a 5-point Likert scale (1 = very poor -5 very good).…”

“…As a part of the DMO, government official websites along with official websites of the ministry of Tourism at national level, play a critical role in promoting the destinations as well as the individual services and facilities of a destination. Therefore, website's features should be carefully selected and designed [14]. The website today is a major marketing tool, the greater the level of sophistication, the greater the impact.…”

Digital Tourism: A Content Analysis of West Java Tourism Websites

“…According to the previous researches, the online information is critical phase to plan a traveling process, currently buying behavior pattern strongly influences by the information from Internet media [11,12]. In order to determined the tourism website, some researcher evaluates the website according to a comprehensive web content, quality, and website design where in this event, the site must be providing a clear information, accurate, and up -to-date [13,14].…”

“…Comparison between accommodation website of five stars hotel using content-based aspect, and also tourism destination information content in tourism promotional official website [16,17]. Research on the website of tourism office within Top 10 priority destinations studied by the facilities and service's information approach that exist on the website [14].…”