Journal of Foodservice Business Research, 18:146–162, 2015 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1537-8020 print/1537-8039 online DOI: 10.1080/15378020.2015.1029386
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The Web as a Marketing Tool in the Spanish Foodservice Industry: Evaluating the Websites of Spain’s Top Restaurants FRANCISCO JAVIER MIRANDA, SERGIO RUBIO, and ANTONIO CHAMORRO Department of Business Management and Sociology, University of Extremadura, Badajoz, Spain
The quality and recognition of Spanish cuisine are fostering the development of culinary tourism, both domestic in origin and from abroad. Another detected trend is that an ever-greater proportion of tourists are using the Internet to obtain information and make decisions about activities to include in their trips. Given this context, the present work describes a comparative analysis of the websites of Spanish restaurants which have at least one Michelin star in order to assess the quality of those webpages and provide some guidance to their designers to facilitate their use as a marketing tool. The instrument used is the Web Assessment Index. This has been validated in other studies, and measures the quality of a website based on four dimensions: visibility, speed, navigability, and content. The results showed the quality of the website to be positively correlated with the category of the corresponding restaurant. KEYWORDS content analysis, Internet, research paper, restaurant websites, tourism marketing, Web design, World Wide Web
Address correspondence to Francisco Javier Miranda, Department of Business Management and Sociology, University of Extremadura, Avda. de Elvas s/n, E-06071 Badajoz, Spain. E-mail:
[email protected] Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www. tandfonline.com/wfbr. 146
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INTRODUCTION The objective of the present study was to conduct a benchmarking analysis of the websites of Spanish restaurants included in the 2011 Michelin Guide, and to determine whether the number of stars a restaurant receives in the Guide is correlated with the quality of its website. The Guide’s international reputation means that the restaurants it includes and their chefs are ideal factors to represent the attractiveness and trustworthiness of a country’s culinary tourism. Gastronomy has become a major tourist attraction, and is becoming one of the primary reasons that tourists choose the destination of their trip. According to data of the Tourism Institute of Spain (Turespaña), of the 52 million tourists who visited Spain in 2009, 6 million declared Spanish food and wine as their main reason for visiting the country. With domestic tourists taken into account, the potential demand for this tourism segment is estimated to be about 16 million people (Ministerio de Industria, Comercio y Turismo, 2010). Indeed, according to that study, 54% of Spaniards state that food and wine are fairly or very influential in their choice of holiday destination. With the widespread use of Internet by the population, Internet marketing and social media marketing have taken on great importance for the promotion of culinary tourism. A specific study conducted by Spain’s Ministry of Industry, Trade, and Tourism (Ministerio de Industria, Comercio y Turismo, 2010) showed that already 11% of tourists use websites as a way to select the restaurants they will eat at on their trips, and 14% make their selection after consulting blogs and social networks. In addition, 15% of tourists make restaurant reservations through webpage forms and another 12% through e-mail available on the website of the restaurant they have chosen. In this sense, a group of experts gathered at the First European Congress of Tourism and Gastronomy (“I Congreso Europeo del Turismo y la Gastronomía”)1 adopted the Madrid Declaration, two of whose conclusions were the following: 1. As a key element of a country’s tourism offer, information on food and wine should be accessible online, through sites that tourists can access before, during, and after their trip. 2. In the promotion of gastronomy, the international media are losing weight to the new media of blogs, social networks, etc. In this context, it is interesting to evaluate the quality of restaurant firms’ websites to shed some light on how companies are adapting to today’s tourist, and to determine whether there is a relationship between this quality and the firm’s performance or prestige. 1
See http://www.spain.info/es/vive/eventos/madrid/evento-especial/congreso_gastronomia.html.
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Using a Web Assessment Index (WAI) that had been validated in other sectors, the websites of the 138 Spanish restaurants included in the Michelin Guide were examined, evaluating their visibility, navigability, loading speed, and content. The results of this research should facilitate the work of those responsible for website design in the catering sector, allowing them to gain an overall picture of the content of their principal competitors’ sites, and to redesign their own site so as to improve the online image of their restaurants. The relevance of these results is evident in view of the growing importance that the Internet has taken on in recent years for the decisions that gastronomic tourists make. The rest of this article is organized as follows. The next section provides a review of the literature related with the use of the Internet as a marketing tool in the tourism sector, and particularly in the so-called culinary tourism; in addition, several website evaluation methods are analyzed. Then, the methodology and the main characteristics of the index designed for evaluating the websites (third section) were describe. The results of this work are analyzed in the final section, and finally a discussion is provided trying to get useful insights for industry and academia.
LITERATURE REVIEW In recent years, many studies on the use of the Internet as a marketing tool in the tourism sector have been published, but mostly focused on the analysis of hotels or tourism destination. Thus, one can find several recent works that study the use of the Internet in hotel management (Noone & Mattila, 2009; Rong, Li, & Law, 2009), others analyzing the effectiveness of the websites of different hotels as a tool for their promotion and sales (Lee & Morrison, 2010; Maier, 2012; Schmidt, Cantallops, & dos Santos, 2008), and others analyzing travel websites (Cheung & Law, 2009; Ip, Lee, & Law, 2012). A restaurant’s presence on the Internet can be a positive instrument for attracting customers. Although its focus was on hotels, the study of Scaglione, Schegg, and Murphy, (2009) based on data collected from 1992 to 2003 found that the occupation of rooms in the 147 hotels analyzed was greater after the hotels had set up an Internet presence than during the time that they had no website. But a mere presence on Internet is not in itself sufficient to attract tourists. Also important is the quality of the websites, as has been shown by various studies applied to firms in the tourism sector (Noone & Mattila, 2009; Rong et al., 2009). While it seems clear that a restaurant’s website design has a direct impact on its customers’ expectations and satisfaction (Wang, Cheng, & Huang, 2004), few studies have analyzed restaurants’ use of the Web as a marketing tool (Gregory, Wang, & DiPietro, 2010; Murphy, Forrest, & Wotring, 1996).
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Indeed, Hwang, Yoon, and Park, (2011) note that there have been very few studies analyzing the Internet marketing applied to the restaurant sector and far between despite the potential importance of their findings. The authors examined customers’ reactions to restaurants’ websites and Internet advertising and obtained very interesting results: Website attitudes positively influence brand attitudes, which in turn positively influences purchase intentions. A more positive website attitude leads to a better brand attitude. In other words, if consumers like a website, the represented company’s products should be better recognized than if consumers do not like a website. Favorable reactions to a website can increase brand loyalty. Furthermore, a more positive brand attitude stimulates purchase intentions. (Hwang et al., 2011, p. 905)
Aware of the importance of gastronomy in tourism, governments have begun to include references to this topic in the promotional campaigns for their tourism destinations. This way, Horng and Tsai (2010) analyze the promotion of culinary tourism on the respective governments’ websites of six Asian countries, and highlight the importance of the content and design of these sites in attracting culinary tourists (or “foodies”). In this vein, there have been several important contributions to the field of website evaluation. For instance, the recent review of Chiou, Lin, and Perng, (2010) of the literature on website evaluation identifies 83 papers in 23 journals in the period 1995–2006. Of particular interest for the purposes of the present work is the classification made by Totz, Riemer, and Klein, (2001) distinguishing between attribute-based and process-based methods: 1. Attribute-based methods assume that the quality of a website can be evaluated from the quality of the various individual attributes into which it can be decomposed. The methods may be objective or subjective. The former seek objectivity in the evaluation using independent judges who value the various attributes after visiting the different websites. Most of these works (Evans & King, 1999; Hernández, Jiménez, & Martín, 2010; Huizingh, 2000; Olsina, Godoy, Lafuente, & Rossi, 1999; Shchiglik & Barnes, 2004) focus on the core content of the pages of the site or on some specific aspect of the site’s design. The latter methods seek to identify variables reflecting the quality perceived by the user. Their essential assumption is that, in these times of intense competition, the importance of the user’s opinion is the key to assessing the richness and quality of the content of different websites (Liang & Chen, 2009; Liu, Du, & Tsai, 2009; Vila & Kuster, 2012). Almost all the studies propose evaluation tools based on certain dimensions linked to the customers’ expectations and needs, introducing variables that have a greater or lesser degree of subjectivity in their formulation.
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2. Process-based methods evaluate the user’s perceived quality of a website in terms of a series of processes and events that occur in his or her interaction with the site. These methods necessarily involve direct observation of the user’s behavior. In general terms, these methods can be classified into two main types: empirical methods and inspection methods. Specifically, the so-called WAI were chosen. This was first because of its objectivity, allowing the restaurants’ websites to be analyzed looking for objective items, thereby reducing the influence that a better image of certain restaurants might have on users’ evaluations if one were to use a subjective method. Second, as with other objective attribute-based methods, the choice of the WAI is founded on its easy adaptability, as demonstrated in the ten years of its successful use in different activity sectors (Miranda & Bañegil, 2004; Miranda, Chamorro, Valero, & Maestre, 2010; Miranda, Cortés, & Barriuso, 2006; Miranda, Sanguino, & Bañegil, 2009).
METHODS In the present study, it was decided to employ an objective attributebased method. While there have been some previous studies evaluating the websites of tourism organizations (Baggio, Corigliano, & Tallinucci, 2007; Baloglu & Pekcan, 2006; Kozak, Bigné, & Andreu, 2005; Wan, 2002), the present work represents the first time that an objective attribute-based method such as the WAI has been applied to the restaurant sector. The focus of previous studies has been either on content analysis, without considering other variables that are relevant to website design such as access speed, navigability, and visibility, or on subjective appreciations of the attractiveness and aesthetics of the site. The use of a method such as the WAI that has been extensively validated in other sectors endows the conclusions that can be drawn from the results with greater rigor. The first step to develop the new measurement index involves delimiting the domain of the construct and generating sample items representing the concept under consideration. In order to ensure content validity, the instrument needs to draw representative items from a universal pool. The sample items were initially assessed using a Delphi method. In accordance with a literature review, a questionnaire was developed to collect the experts’ opinions. The WAI is based on four essential categories for the assessment of a site’s quality: visibility, speed, navigability, and content. The final index value is a weighted sum of the scores of each of these four categories. The experts’ opinions were to be expressed on a 10-point scale. Some of the questions were “open response” items in order for the panelists to be able to set out their preferences, to add suggestions, or to comment freely.
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Experts were contacted by e-mail and telephone explaining clearly the purpose of the study, what commitments their participation would involve, what the method consisted of, and what its objectives were. The experts who agreed to participate were e-mailed the questionnaire and then they were telephoned 15 days after this first mailing, reminding them of the importance of their contribution. The total number of completed questionnaires received in the first round was 12. While the number of panelists can be considered normal in the context of previous studies of this type, it is clear that a greater number could have added further precision to the results. After each round, an interim consensus analysis was conducted based on descriptive statistics (mean, standard deviation and interquartile range). The following Delphi round included the group response and aggregated arguments for each score. Each expert had the chance to revise answers from previous rounds based on the stated group opinion and justifications. In the second round of the method, the 152 panelists were again sent the questionnaire, but this time accompanied by a copy of their responses in the first round and the mean score for each item obtained from the responses of all the panelists. With this information, they were asked to reflect again on each item and score it appropriately. Upon receipt of the completed questionnaires in this second round, the authors proceeded to analyze, quantitatively and qualitatively, the different responses to the items. A third round was not considered necessary since the level of consensus seemed high, with there being no major differences. After these two Delphi rounds the items included in each category of the WAI were the following.
Visibility The quality of a website is greater if the site is easily identifiable and accessible to users. A privileged position in the order of presentation of a search engine will in general result in increased traffic and, consequently, an improvement in the site’s visibility. A search engine usually provides its users with the information they are looking for directly and efficiently in response to their entering appropriately related keywords (Liu et al., 2009). The simplest measure of a site’s visibility is its popularity as determined by the number of hits it receives. However, there are ways to artificially inflate this measure of popularity, so that the total of hits does not necessarily reflect the actual number of page views. For this reason, the most widely used measure of popularity is the number of external links to the site and its pages (Buenadicha, Chamorro, Miranda, & González, 2001). Popularity is considered to be a good indicator of visibility, with the greater the number of pages linking to the page under study, the more traffic it is likely to
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receive, and consequently search engines will rank it higher (Miranda & Bañegil, 2004). One of the novelties of the present study is that it complements the measure of popularity used in previous studies with the new “ranking implementers” (i.e., Google Page Ranking, Alexa, and Yahoo Ranking) which are capable of making more accurate classifications since in many cases they use more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms for study.
Speed The second category is based on access speed and response time. The significance of these variables is that the time required to access information is critical factor for Web users seeking information. Several studies have found that the individual’s attention can only stand 10 seconds of inactivity, after which the user will begin to perform other tasks, redirect the search to another site, or simply stop browsing (Cao, Zhang, & Seydel, 2005). Indeed, Muylle, Moenaert, and Despontin (1998) already noted that there was a significant correlation between a page’s loading speed and user satisfaction. While this speed can of course be chronometered, it is influenced by a number of factors including the characteristics of the computer used, connection time, traffic to the page, etc. In order to reduce the effect of these factors, multiple measurements were made of the speed of loading of each page, always with the same hardware and the same connection. Such speed tests generally measure a file’s downloading times between the server and the client computer. The speed (V ) is calculated as the ratio between the number of bits in the downloaded file and how long it takes to download: V (bits/sec) =
(Tfinal
bits . − Tbeginning )
The test measures the download and upload speed between the point where the test server is located and the user’s computer (the client). The result corresponds to the useful bandwidth at the moment of the test, and is equivalent to the speed of information transfer between the server of the chosen center and the client from which the test was performed. The tool used to perform the speed test was PingDom, which provides measurements of the loading speed of an HTML page including all its objects (i.e., images, CSS, Java scripts, RSS, Flash, and frames/iframes), mimicking the form in the page is loaded in a Web browser. The speed tests were done from a U.S. server using many instances of Google’s Chrome Web browser to load websites and record performance data.
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Navigability When visitors access a restaurant’s website, they are usually seeking specific information. An inappropriate design of the site may adversely affect the number of visits if users fail to find what they want, because the result may well be the loss of potential future visits due to that negative initial experience. Searches are typically facilitated by implementing a keyword search function. In this way, the users will access the desired information more rapidly (with fewer clicks), which will increase their level of satisfaction and consequently the number of future visitors accessing the site. A welldesigned site has its index (or main menu) always on screen, allowing any person to have straightforward and fast access to the location of the specific items they are looking for. Another contribution to navigability will be the presence of a site map. Given this context, the factors used to evaluate this category were the following Miranda and Bañegil (2004): 1. A permanently displayed menu allowing quick access to the different sections from each page. 2. A site map showing schematically the various sections to aid users in accessing a specific point that they want to reach and in knowing where they are at all times. 3. A keyword search function, allowing users to locate the information that is available on the restaurant’s site. In the present study, the evaluator just had to note whether or not these indicators appeared on the website they were analyzing. All three indicators were assigned equal weight in evaluating the site’s navigability.
Content The fourth category is the quality of the site’s content. This is measured by assessing the presence of information relevant to the needs of users. The factors used in this assessment were identified from an analysis of previous studies (Buenadicha et al., 2001; Huizingh, 2000; Kozak et al., 2005; Miranda & Bañegil, 2004; Miranda et al., 2006), together with the opinion of experts on the Internet and tourism, and taking into account the experience of the research team. The 31 items that were studied for each of the restaurants’ websites are listed below:
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• • • • • • • • • • •
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Telephone Address E-mail Online form: Information Online form: Comments Online: Reservations E-mail reservations Mobile phone reservations The personnel Menu Prices
• • • • • • • • • • •
Special offers Publications History Multilingual Photos of dishes Photos of the premises Video 360◦ photos of the premises Location map GPS Jobs
• Recipes • Cultural and natural environment • Features and style of the premises • Wine cellar • Press/news • Recommend to a friend • Social networks • Blog • Newsletter
In the four categories (visibility, speed, navigability, and content), the data is displayed on a scale of 0 to 100. To arrive at those values, each value was divided by the highest value and then multiplied by 100. The final index value is a weighted sum of the scores obtained in each of these categories: WAI = w1 x Visibility Value + w2 x Speed Value + w3 x Navigability Value + w4 x Content Value The weights (wi ) for each category were obtained from the Delphi study. Specifically, after the two Delphi rounds, the assigned weights were: visibility (30%), speed (10%), navigability (10%), and content (50%). With the different categories of the index defined, the websites of the 138 Spanish restaurants included in the Michelin Guide 2011were visited. These visits were conducted in May 2011 using computers with the same characteristics and in the same time slot.
RESULTS OF APPLYING THE WAI TO SPAIN’S RESTAURANT SECTOR Figure 1 shows the restaurants scoring highest on the WAI, but the most interesting contribution of the study lies not in identifying the best websites, but in comparing them and being able to make suggestions on ideas and practices that may improve each restaurant’s Web presence with a view to its use as a marketing tool. An analysis of the websites by restaurant category (as measured by the number of Michelin stars) showed them to differ significantly in the total value of the WAI and in their visibility, but not in speed, navigability, or content (Table 1). Therefore, the results confirm that the restaurants with more Michelin stars are those with the best websites and with the highest values of visibility (i.e., of popularity). As a general rule, the pages whose content downloaded rapidly were also easily navigable. The download speeds ranged between
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Mas Pau (1 star) El Nuevo Molino (1 star) El Lago (1 star) Andra Mari (1 star) Real Balneario (1 star) Coque (1 star) Alejandro (1 star) Caelis (Ht. Palace) (1 star)
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Can Jubany (1 star) Can Fabes (3 stars) El Bulli (3 stars) Tristan (1 star) Zortziko (1 star) Etxanobe (1 star) Mugaritz (2 stars) 0.0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8
0.9
1.0
FIGURE 1 Values of the WAI.
TABLE 1 WAI According to the Number of Michelin Stars Number of stars 1 star 2 stars 3 stars F-test ∗ Statistically
WAI
Visibility
Speed
Navigability
Content
0.3891 0.3984 0.4659 2.882∗
0.2195 0.2471 0.3176 7.623∗∗
0.1230 0.1037 0.0689 0.535
0.3776 0.3611 0.3333 0.437
0.5465 0.5556 0.6607 1.961
significant at a 90% confidence level. significant at a 95% confidence level.
∗∗ Statistically
0.1 seconds and 11.4 seconds, and predictably, there was a negative correlation between speed and content. The tests showed no statistically significant differences in this parameter between different categories of restaurant. With respect to the navigability of the websites, 96.4% of them had a permanent menu facilitating navigation, although a keyword search function was present on only 5.1%, and only 7.2% had a site map. As noted previously, there were no significant differences in this parameter between the different categories of restaurant. The most common informational content of the sites (more than 70% of the websites) corresponded to a map locating the restaurant, the menu, and photographs of the premises (Figure 2). More than 40% of the sites contained information on prices, press items relating to the restaurant, and photographs of the most significant dishes on the menu, and one-third of the sites offered information on the features and
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360º photos Video Publications Recipes Special offers GPS Wine cellar Job offers Environment
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History Personnel Premises (features & style) Prices Press/News Photos of dishes Photos of the premises Menu Location map 0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
FIGURE 2 Informational content.
style of the premises, the restaurant’s history and its personnel, the characteristics of the natural and cultural environment in which it is located, and job offers or the possibility for candidates to present their job applications for work in the restaurant. The content that was less commonly present on the sites consisted of information on the restaurant’s wine cellar, the GPS coordinates of its location, information about special offers, the chef’s suggested recipes, or data on publications by the restaurant’s personnel. Only 9.5% of the restaurants included videos on their website, and 7.3% 360◦ photographs. With respect to communications content (Figure 3), practically all the sites included contact information, whether telephone or postal address, and some 75.9% also included an e-mail address. Surprisingly, however, there were still 35.8% of the sites which did not include multilingual support or the possibility of displaying the site in various languages. Moreover, the ability to make reservations online was provided by 52.6% of the sites, and e-mail reservations by 10.9%. Currently, there is an evolution of website design toward the Web 2.0 approach, aimed at fostering user participation and collaboration in order to facilitate the provision of information on the Web. In this sense, the socalled Tourism 2.0 concept is characterized by total user involvement by means of encouraging them to provide feedback with their opinions, suggestions, and comments concerning tourism products and services, sharing this information through videos, photos, and blogs so as to form a content
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Recommend to a friend Newsletter Online form for comments Blog Social networks
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Online form for information Multilingual E-mail Address Telephone 0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90% 100%
FIGURE 3 Communication contents.
that can influence other potential customers in deciding on their destinations, activities, etc. Such interactive elements should, therefore, clearly be playing a key role in the restaurant sector’s Web designs. However, the actual interactive capability of most of the sites analyzed was still of little relevance: only 26.3% included an online form for information requests and 10.2% an online form for complaints and comments. Just a 14% of websites included a blog, and 10% some other tool for user participation (newsletters, the option of making a recommendation to a friend, etc.). Therefore, the subject of social networks merits special mention, due to these networks (Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc.) can be considered as one of the most powerful marketing tools on the Internet. A recent study by the U.S. National Restaurant Association (NRA) found that 8 out of every 10 of their member restaurants intended to access social networks during 2011 as a strategy to gain new customers and retain old ones (NRA, 2011). In the Spanish case examined in the present study, only 20.4% of the Michelin star restaurants had a presence on social networks (primarily on Facebook and Twitter), so that the potential for development in this area may well be a strategic opportunity for these firms.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS Recent years have seen growing international recognition of Spanish cuisine and in particular of the country’s haute cuisine with these restaurants
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having come to be considered the best in the world. Indeed, the magazine Restaurant publishes an annual list of the world’s top 50 restaurants, and in 2011 two of the top three, and three of the top eight, were Spanish (www.theworlds50best.com). This represents an incentive for the nation’s tourism sector in that these restaurants have the capacity to attract many new customers. In the promotion of this culinary tourism, the use of new technologies, specifically of the Internet, has a crucial role to play as a means by which these tourists can consult and select the activities to include in their trips. In this sense, various studies of tourism firms have examined the relevance of their Internet presence and the quality of their websites in attracting customers and affecting visitors’ purchasing decisions. In concordance with this line of research, the present study has sought to examine the quality of the websites of Spanish restaurants included in the 2011 edition of the Michelin Guide, and to determine whether there is a relationship between that quality and the number of stars they received as a measure of their prestige and recognition. Indeed, these establishments can be considered as sources of attraction of culinary tourism for the country. The WAI used in the study has been extensively validated in other sectors. It allowed the raw data obtained from examining the websites to be analyzed with the necessary rigor. The WAI is calculated on the basis of four categories essential to the quality of a site: visibility, speed, navigability, and content. The results showed there to be significant differences in both the overall value of the WAI and the visibility score (essentially reflecting the site’s popularity). This seems reasonable a priori, since one would expect the websites of the top-ranked restaurants to be more appealing to the culinary tourist, and hence, their visibility would be correspondingly greater than that of establishments with fewer stars. In an age in which marketing experts are talking about a paradigm shift in consumer behavior, the validation of the WAI as a tool for measuring the quality of websites in the catering sector and the results of its application have major implications for website managers. As was noted at the beginning of the third section, the most interesting contribution of the present work is to be able to make suggestions about ideas and practices that could improve a restaurant’s website in terms of its potential as a marketing tool. In this sense, a restaurant’s website design contributes to building its reputation and prestige, facilitates tourists’ access to information on dining options when planning their trip, allows them to easily book the restaurant’s services, and provides them with the geographic location when they are unfamiliar with the city in which the restaurant is located. According to the Delphi study, the site’s content is the most important factor in its overall quality. With respect to the information content in particular, such elements as the GPS coordinates of the restaurant, recipes of its
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typical dishes, publications referring to the restaurant, and a major inclusion of multimedia content (videos, panoramas, etc.) were seldom found in the websites studied, so that these and similar differentiating elements might well be considered for incorporation into the site’s design to significantly improve the user’s perception. Moreover, the sites’ interactive capacities were clearly susceptible of improvement. In particular, the incorporation of elements that give a site greater interactivity would be recommended: guestbooks, newsletters, the option of recommending the restaurant to a friend, and, above all, the presence on social media. As in all academic work, there are clear future lines of work to deepen and complement the present results. Of particular interest is the possibility of determining whether culinary tourists visit a restaurant’s website before actually making their decision to eat there. This information would shed some light on the capacity of websites to influence the purchasing decision process. Another line of clear interest would be to evaluate the potential commercial benefits these restaurants might expect to derive from the use of the Internet, social networks, etc. The main limitation of our study is that the data were collected at a single point in time. An interesting future line of inquiry would therefore be to conduct a longitudinal analysis to see how the factors considered evolve over a period of time. As noted above, the principal shortcoming of the Web assessment tool used here is the subjectivity of the weights assigned to each category. As recommended in the literature, this limitation was dealt with by having recourse to independent expert opinion. Finally, it has to be noted that with periodic use this tool would become even more effective, since it would allow one to analyze the evolution of the different websites over time, with which the administrator responsible for a site could progressively modify its design as new trends emerged and were identified. Naturally, the results of the present study need to be interpreted within the context for which this research was designed—that of the leading restaurants in Spain. In particular, the conclusions and results do not necessarily carry over to other environments and circumstances. It is believed, however, that both the methodological approach and, above all, its application to a sector in which Spain is a world reference mean that the findings should be useful both for those responsible for marketing in these firms in helping them fix the strategy for the design of their websites as a marketing tool, and for researchers in this field in suggesting new lines of work in this area.
REFERENCES Baggio, R., Corigliano, M. A., & Tallinucci, V. (2007). The websites of a tourism destination: A network analysis. Proceedings of the ENTER2007–14th International
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