Website Quality Assessment: A Case Study of Chinese Airlines

Abstract

The importance of Chinese tourism is growing and so is the level of competition of the companies related to it. The websites of these companies is a key element. It is very important that websites - visited by clients for information search, decision making, and subsequent booking - respond to the expectations of users. The web pages must be designed according to criteria such as web quality. The aim of this paper was the construction of a model for the analysis of the quality of the websites. We took as a reference the Index Web Evaluation (IEW). Four blocks were identified: accessibility, speed, navigability/usability, and content quality. The model was used to analyze the websites of 25 Chinese airlines. For this, we attended to the items contained in this index, modified and expanded it, and adapted it to fulfill the objective of the study. According to the scores, the weights of each aspect and dimension, a ranking of the websites of the Chinese airlines was presented. The results indicated that international airlines had a better website. Accessibility was a weak point on the web. Within the category of navigability, the languages that the websites were translated into was another weak point for most companies. On the other hand, one of the strong points was the quality of the content of the web pages. In addition, points of improvement were provided for each of the airlines analyzed.