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

The present research aims to rank the relative performance of tourism websites in terms of e-satisfaction, e-trust, e-quality, and e-loyalty. To this end, two major Iranian travel websites providing accommodation (Iran Hotel Online) and tour packages (Marcopolo Corporation) are chosen and their performance is evaluated based on the above variables. This research comprises two separate surveys, first of which based on the university professors’ and websites designers’ reports (155 samples) and through structural equation modeling (SEM) examined the relative weight of variables in explaining the performance of websites. The results of this survey indicate that e-quality, e-loyalty, e-trust, and e-satisfaction have the strongest impact on the websites’ performance, respectively. In the second survey, based on websites existing e-customers’ reports (two categories of 154 and 187 samples) and also qualitative analysis of the websites’ characteristics, relative weights of the websites’ performance are calculated 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. In particular, this advantage is strongly felt in the case of trust variable that might be well attributed to its more well-established brand. At the end, both weights are synthesized (0.580 and 0.418 for Marcopolo and Iran Hotel Online, respectively) and the websites’ performance is ranked indicating that Marcopolo website’s performance is higher than its counterpart in the all four variables. The current paper contributes to the literature by yielding some insight into how to benchmark websites performance in order to improve e-performance based on customers’ and experts’ perspectives.