Sri Lankan travellers needs and expectations about airline websites Literature review

Sri Lankan travellers needs and expectations about airline websites - Literature review Example Increasing demands of the customers have forced almost every business to have their own website. Similarly the airline industry has also been actively participating in this race and many airlines now maintain very attractive and eye catching websites (Weeks and Crouch, 1999; Morrison et al., 1999). The recent years have seen many studies and researches in the field of website assessment (Liu, 2000, Olsina, 1999 and Barnes and Vidgeon, 2001). Although there is a great deal of variation in the website design and content amongst different industries nonetheless quite a few assessment tools with precise excellence criterion have been made (Kim, Shaw and Schneider, 2003). The flowchart regarding the website evaluation is given below: Figure: 1 Website Evaluation Flowchart (Park and Gretzel, 2007, p.48). Website evaluation methods used by different authors As the internet has developed very rapidly there has been a number of websites available now. This vastness of information and types of websites makes it a necessity there must be some sort of criteria for the evaluation of these websites so that a proper level of quality can be maintained and junk material could be avoided (Seoyoung and Jinwoo, 2004). In order to carry out this evaluation a study was carried out and the characteristics were collected and analyzed. The contents were divided in to a number of categories so that it becomes easy to evaluate each one. The 4 Ps category division by McCarthy (1976) was adapted as the initial division criterion These 4 Ps were â€Å"product, price, promotion and point-of-sale†. It has been argued by some researchers that the above mentioned 4 Ps fit properly with the internet related stuff especially websites (Chaffey et al., 2003) however some other authors recommend total substitution of these 4 Ps (Constantinides, 2002; Kotler, 1998). A model for the adaptation of internet commerce has been developed by Burgess and Cooper (1999). The model is composed of 3 point s i.e. endorsement that relates knowledge regarding the corporation provision regarding interaction dispensation linked to online communication Ho (1997) uses an approach for website evaluation that is based upon the approach of phases. According to him the structure of the evaluation criterion is based upon 2 dimensional matrixes. First dimension is of â€Å"purpose† which is divided into 3 further categories i.e. Promotion i.e. data regarding the services and products provided to the clients Provision i.e. presence of information in order to attain the exposure, good will, and credibility. Processing i.e. commerce dealings. The 2nd dimension is called ‘value-created’’. This dimension is also divided into further categories named i.e. well-timed worth, custom significance, logistic worth and amazing value. Wan (2002) projected a tool for evaluating and ranking the international websites for tourists. He used 3 categories i.e. diversity of knowledge, user interface ease, and online reservation facility. â€Å"Airline Site Evaluation Framework (ASEF)† The website analysis of an air line usually address the requirement for ASEF i.e. a â€Å"client-oriented Airline Site Evaluation Framework (ASEF)† in which the assessment techniques and instrumentation methods developed previously were used with particular