Microsoft Word 2007 ichrie conference Proceedings Final-Final 06-06-07. doc

 
DISCUSSION 
The goal of this study was to benchmark Dubai's website against websites of its five direct competitors. A 
review of the literature highlighted the increasing importance of online marketing by DMOs. It also revealed the 
need to evaluate websites to measure their effectiveness due to the high setup and maintenance costs of destination 
websites. Many frameworks and approaches for website evaluation have been used in prior studies. The most 
popular approach was found to be the modified BSC tool (Morrison et al. 2004). This study used the “Mills and 
Morrison (2002) Standardized Website Evaluation Form” as presented in Appendix 1 by Morrison at al. (2004). Ten 
evaluators from tourism and hospitality industry professionals, all with web navigation expertise, performed a pair-
wise evaluation of the websites. As was shown in Table 1, the overall ratings of the websites were disappointingly 
low with only Singapore being rated above average. Based on this overall rating, it can be concluded that the 
benchmarked websites were underselling their respective destinations. This finding is consistent with the findings of 
Feng, Morrison and Ismail (2002) who evaluated websites of 14 tourist offices in East and South East Asia. 
Compared to its main competitors, Dubai’s website was ranked below that of Singapore and Qatar, ranked equal 
with that of Bahrain and was ranked above Egypt and Mauritius. Given the consistently superior rating of 
Singapore’s website, the Singapore website appears to be a good choice for best practice benchmarking by Dubai. 
While not consistently highly rated in performance across all categories, Bahrain and Qatar also appear appropriate 
for competitive benchmarking. 
Much has been written regarding the importance of visual appeal of websites. Studies have shown that 
visual appeal is necessary to create trust and make the site look credible (McMahon, 2005). Furthermore, for a 
website that is trying to sell a destination, visual appeal is among the website’s essential features. On visual appeal, 
the Singapore website was rated highest. The appearance and layout of this site were its major strengths. Each page 
was visually stimulating containing a combination of text, graphics and photographs while none of the pages were 
composed solely of text. Qatar ranked second in this category. The homepage of the Qatar website is attractive and 
original although this look and feel is not consistently maintained throughout the site. Dubai, Bahrain and Mauritius 
ranked third, fourth and fifth in visual appeal. The Dubai website was rated low on proper use of color and font, as 
well as on the lack of visually appealing images. Similarly, Bahrain was rated low in these same categories. 

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