Exploring the Relevance of Usability Criteria to the Booking Process in E-Tourism

Diploma Thesis from the year 2008 in the subject Computer Science - Internet, New Technologies, grade: 70%, University of Westminster (Business), language: English, abstract: This research addresses the usability issues that are essential particularly for e-tourism websites: how easy or difficult is it for individuals to use and interact with online travel portals? Usability is a measure of quality of a website's presence. As high usability is a key component of overall user satisfaction, this research focuses on a specific online travel website, Tiscover, to find out critical usability criteria from the point of view of online users. Extensive research about usability and its respective criteria is centre of this paper, together with insight of the rise and current status of e-tourism. E-tourism has gained a lot of importance in today's consumer society as gathering information for tourism destinations and online booking have become commonplace. Literature about usability together with e-tourism is scarce and therefore it becomes a challenge to explore these two important aspects of the Internet in depth. Six interviews with experienced Internet users were conducted. The emphasis was on the website's homepage and booking process which consists of five different steps. The research is based on the usability-testing method and was analysed via the content analysis to provide rich findings and determine critical usability factors.