Turning Click-Through Visitors into Customers: A Study of Chinese Hotel Websites

ABSTRACT The far-reaching ability of the Internet makes it a powerful marketing tool for hotels that are interested in attracting customers from around the world. As China poises to gain more market share in the global tourism market, the effective use of website as a marketing tool to attract and retain customers can affect the competitiveness within the Chinese hotel industry. This study provides an overview of the content and transaction capabilities offered by a sample of major Chinese hotels' websites from Mainland China. The results indicate that most of the five-stars hotels in China do have a bi-lingual website with English and Chinese being the predominant languages used. While basic information about the hotel and the facilities are provided on a typical Chinese hotel website, most of the hotel websites do not have other value-added links such as travel partners, local attractions or other sites that will provide travelers with a one-stop travel-related shopping site. The results also show that while there are a high percentage of Chinese hotels offering bi-lingual or multi-lingual information on the websites, the majority of on-line reservation systems are only available in English. This lack of consistency between the front-end of the website and the back-end (transaction processing) can hinder the effectiveness of a hotel's website from generating revenue from non-English speaking customers.