Comparing and Ranking tourism websites performance based on e-satisfaction, e-trust, e-quality, and e-loyalty: A combined approach of structural equation modeling, fuzzy and analytical hierarchical process

This research aims to rank the relative performance of tourism websites in terms of e-satisfaction, e-trust, e-quality, and e-loyalty variables. To this end, two major Iranian travel websites providing accommodation (Iran Hotel Online) and tour packages (Marcopolo Corporation) were chosen and their performances were evaluated based on the four above variables. This research comprises two independent surveys. The first survey administered to a sample of 155 university professors and website designers examined the relative weights of the study variables in explaining the e-performance of these websites through structural equation modeling (SEM). The results indicate that e-quality, e-loyalty, e-trust, and e-satisfaction have the strongest impact on the e-performance, respectively. The second survey examined relative weights of the e-performance based on the websites’ existing e-customers (two categories of 154 and 187 samples) and also qualitative content analysis of the websites’ characteristics using fuzzy analytical hierarchical process (AHP). The findings served to inform that Marcopolo website obtained stronger weights for all four variables, compared with Iran Hotel Online, indicating its higher performance in all variables. At the end, the weight values from the SEM and AHP surveys were synthesized (0.580 and 0.418 for Marcopolo and Iran Hotel Online, respectively) in order to rank the websites based on their e-performances. According to the findings, Marcopolo website outperforms its counterpart in all four variables. The current paper contributes to the literature by yielding some insights into how to benchmark websites in order to improve their e-performance based on perspectives of both customers and experts