Competitive Benchmarking of Tourism Destination Websites: Dubai Case Study

COMPETITIVE BENCHMARKING of TOURISM DESTINATION WEBSITES: DUBAI CASE STUDY

Morag I. Stewart

The Emirates Academy of Hospitality Management

Dubai, UAE

morag.stewart@emiratesacademy.edu

Methini Ramasamy

Jumeirah Group

Dubai, UAE

methini.ramasamy@jumeirah.com

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a competitive benchmarking study comparing the website of Dubai to websites of its five direct-competitor destinations. After the introduction, the importance of tourism destination websites is discussed followed by a review of website evaluation approaches. A modified Balanced Scorecard (BSC) was selected for evaluation of site content and usability while automated tools were used for evaluating technical features. The BSC Questionnaires were completed by ten evaluators using a pair-wise comparison method. Singapore’s website was rated highest overall suggesting its suitability for best practice benchmarking. Based on the BSC category ratings, suggestions were offered for improving Dubai’s website.

Key Words: Competitive benchmarking; website evaluation; tourism destination website; Dubai

INTRODUCTION

Dubai is an ambitious competitor for tourism business. The Dubai Department of Tourism and Commerce Marketing (DTCM) is charged with “… the international promotion of Dubai’s commerce and tourism interests вЂ¦Ð²Ð‚Ñœ and “… the planning, supervision and development of the tourism sector in the emirate вЂ¦Ð²Ð‚Ñœ (About DTCM, 2006). DTCM is chaired by His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, UAE Vice President and Ruler of Dubai; strong evidence of the importance of tourism to the economy of the emirate of Dubai. Over the last several years, Dubai has experienced double digit growth in tourism with growth statistics of 14% to 30% recorded during the four quarters from October 2005 to September 2006 (DTCM, 2006). The annual number of arrivals in Dubai is rapidly approaching seven million visitors. By comparison the number of “virtual” arrivals or visitors to Dubai’s official website greatly surpasses the number of visitors to Dubai. According to Mr. Suhail Buhelaiba, IT Manager for DTCM, the DTCM website (www.dubaitourism.ae) averages 1.5 million visitors a day and plays a “… crucial role in broadening the international profile of Dubai вЂ¦Ð²Ð‚Ñœ (Press release 1218, 2006). Given the ubiquitous reach of the Internet, modern tourism destinations face global competition in cyberspace, competition more intense than experienced by the destination. This competitive phenomenon seems certain to continue. With Virtual Holidays cited as a future social trend (TUI, 2006) the need for destinations to compete electronically will increase. Online competition will drive destinations to continuously evaluate their virtual presence, their website.

Benchmarking is one of the management strategies that an organization can use to measure its performance against “… the products, practices, and services of some of its most efficient global competitors вЂ¦Ð²Ð‚Ñœ (Hill & Jones, 1998, p. 135). While benchmarking is making measured comparisons, competitive benchmarking is making comparisons against self-identified direct competitors. In the DTCM Strategic Plan: 2005-2010, DTCM identified five destinations as direct competitors of Dubai. These five destinations and their corresponding websites are: Egypt (www.touregypt.net), Singapore (www.visitsingapore.com), Mauritius (www.mauritius-info.com), Qatar (www.experienceqatar.com) and Bahrain (www.bahraintourism.com). Given these five destinations were identified by DTCM as Dubai’s competitors, their websites formed the competitive set for benchmarking Dubai’s website.

ONLINE MARKETING of TOURISM DESTINATIONS

Being one of the largest industries in the world (Oorni & Klein, 2003), travel and tourism quickly staked a place among the most important application domains on the Internet (Werthner & Klein, 1999). Over time the Internet has proved to be an “ideal medium” for the travel and tourism industry (WTO, 2001) with online travel websites disseminating inexpensive, high-quality information about travel, destinations, and product alternatives. Like other service industries, many tourist products are intangible i.e. they cannot be touched, seen, tasted or smelt and are therefore difficult for tourists to grasp and evaluate (Liu, 2000). Furthermore, tourists cannot actually assess the quality of a tourism product prior to arrival at the destination for the tourism experience. These unique characteristics of the tourism product lead the would-be tourist to seek information about a destination from its brochures and other media in order to evaluate the destination prior to making a travel purchase decision.

According to on-going research and analysis conducted by the European Travel Commission, the Internet has dramatically changed the information gathering behavior of the modern-era traveler. The Internet, with a wealth of information, images and multimedia provides the appropriate stimuli to facilitate the purchase of travel products and services (Baggio, 2003). Its use for gathering destination information and purchasing tourism products and services is expected to continue increasing as Internet penetration rates continually increase (WTO, 2001). About 95% of Web users have used the Internet to gather travel related information and about 93% indicate that they visited tourism websites when planning their vacations (WTO, 2005). This readily accessible information on destinations coupled with increasingly sophisticated search engines to find and analyze the information (Destination marketing, 2006) has greatly increased global competition among tourism destinations. A destination’s competitive advantage is therefore increasingly linked to, and driven by, its innovative use of Internet technology. Consequently the role of Destination Management Organizations (DMOs) is changing and web marketing by DMOs has become essential to increase inbound international visitors to their destinations. As per the World Tourism Organization’s 2020 Vision, an increasing number of DMOs are developing