TRAVEL DESTINATION WEBSITES: CROSS-CULTURAL EFFECTS ON PERCEIVED INFORMATION VALUE AND PERFORMANCE EVALUATION

Tourism researchers and destination marketers have been increasingly emphasizing the use of tourism websites for effective destination promotion purposes. Using the official Korean Tourism Guide website as a venue, a survey instrument collected primary data (N = 493) in three countries (Korea, China, and the United States). In an effort to detect cross-cultural effects on relevant factors in online travel information search behavior, this study attempts to apply the information value structure (Cho & Jang, 2008) to travel destination websites and also to develop a valid instrument to evaluate the performance of the website across nationalities. The results reveal that the cross-cultural effects on the hypothesized factors are consistently significant across nationalities, providing valuable insights into the development of travel destination websites to effectively cater to different source markets.