A comparison of the official tourism website of five east tourism destinations

This paper has two research objectives. First, it adopts the Information, Communication, Transaction, Relationship, and Technical Merit model to evaluate Destination Marketing Organization (DMO) web sites from five East Asian countries. Second, it examines the relationship between website complexity and performance. The results indicate that the five selected DMO websites have not fully utilized information technology in their business operations. All five websites have performed reasonably well on the information and communication dimensions. However, three web sites perform poorly in the transaction dimension. Among the five selected countries, the Korean DMO’s website received the highest score for effectiveness, followed by the Japanese, Thai, and Hong Kong websites. The Macau DMO’s website received the lowest score for effectiveness. In addition to evaluating website effectiveness, this study found a linear relationship between website complexity and performance. Also there are significant performance variances among the DMOs’ websites across different countries.

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