Compatibility with E-commerce in the Iranian Hotel Industry

Abstract

Websites are major actors in the expansion of tourism activities and attracting tourists nowadays. In this line, benefitting from a website with proper attributes can play a pivotal role in attracting tourists to the industry in general and to the hotel industry in particular. The present study evaluates Iranian hotel websites in order to measure the compatibility of their e-commerce activities. To achieve this goal, content analysis was used to evaluate 48 website features of 57 Iranian hotels with different ratings (one to five-stars). Findings manifest that internet adoption in the hotel industry in Iran is in its early stages. E-commerce related activities are very minimal and online reservations are not effectively present in them

Keywords

• e-tourism
• website
• evaluation
• hotel industry