How Good is this Destination Website: A User-centered Evaluation of Provincial Tourism Websites☆

Abstract This study aims to propose a comprehensive and reliable instrument to measure the perceived quality of destination websites. The tool evaluates destination websites according to four quality factors integrated from existing tools: information completeness, credibility, usability, and persuasiveness. Filipino domestic tourists were asked to use the tool to evaluate four provincial tourism websites in the Philippines. Measurements were taken for every factor. An initial reliability analysis was done to remove questionnaire items that weaken the Cronbach's alpha of the instrument. Then, principal component analysis was used on the remaining items to check the unidimensionality of the tool. This analysis reduced the original four factors into three, namely influence, completeness, and usability. Credibility and persuasiveness merged into a single factor, called influence, while completeness and usability were confirmed to be standalone factors. Scores for every factor as well as an aggregate score of all three factors, called the User-Perceived Quality (UPQ) score, were computed. The scores were used to draw comparisons between the websites used in the study. Design and managerial implications are also discussed. A final reliability analysis showed that the proposed tool gave higher measurement reliability (measured by Cronbach's alpha) than other existing tools. Hence, the tool developed, called the User-Perceived Quality Scale, is put forward as a potential standard framework for evaluating destination websites.