Towards a framework for hotel website evaluation

The growing importance of tourism industry in world economy reflects on tourism growing importance in Croatian economy as well. Tourism industry represents one of the areas in which Internet technology has a significant influence changing some of the key industry premises. Hotel website offers new opportunities for hoteliers. But it is essential to hoteliers to evaluate their web presence and to compare their quality with competition in the marketplace. Building evaluation framework and procedure for this purpose is not simple task. This paper presents one possible framework for hotel website evaluation performed to evaluate the Web sites of Croatian high class hotels and their content. The study results show that management of Croatian top hotels is still using Web and Internet technology for presentation purposes solely and there is no conscious that its content needs to be managed well. It is obvious that Internet is still not adequately understand, accepted and integrated within hotel management in Croatia. The absence of the very basic information about the hotel and their offer, e-mail form request for reservation information illustrate this hotel management attitude. Key-Words: tourism, hotel web sites quality, survey, Croatia