Online Marketing & Travel Agencies. Development stages of websites and the use of webmetrics.

The way that tourism businesses communicate with their customers has changed in recent years with the development of information technologies and the Internet. The Internet has formed new practices in marketing and changed the buying behaviour of tourists. Websites act as extended company offices, open 24/7, and represent the quality of services and products offered by the company. The extended model of Internet commerce adoption (eMICA) is used to evaluate the level of website development in Iceland´s travel agencies and a survey of five questions is used to gain an insight into the e-marketing strategy and the use of the website as a marketing tool and how the success of it is measured. A significant finding of the website evaluation is that according to the eMICA the majority of the websites have only developed to the provision stage. After a further analysis the website evaluation also suggests that websites of the Icelandic travel agencies do not necessarily follow the suggested development stages of the eMICA and do in fact offer functions at different layers and stages out of order. The survey reveals that the travel agencies have clear objectives set for their websites and have adopted web analytics to their use but fall short on using good key performance indicators or actionable metrics that focus on revenue and having business impact. The paper concludes with suggestions and ideas about further research on the same and related topics. Keywords: eMarketing, Websites, travel agencies, tourism, web metrics, eMIC