Online Airfare Reservation Services: A Study of Asian-Based and North American-Based Travel Web Sites

This article reports on a study about examining airfare reservation services in travel Web sites. The research proposes an e-travel business framework, and then uses a content-based analysis to evaluate 30 North American-based travel Web sites and 30 Asian-based travel Web sites to determine their level of service provisions in the context of the proposed framework. The attributes selected for evaluations fall into five major dimensions: i) Information Quality, ii) System Use, iii) System Quality, iv) Service Quality, and v) Customer Loyalty. Experimental results show that the Asian-based and the North American-based travel Web sites have achieved different outcomes. The North American-based Web sites outperform their Asian counterparts significantly in many selected variables.