Online positioning through website service quality: A case of star-rated hotels in Taiwan

This study develops a website quality scale for online positioning for the hospitality industry, and analyzes the online-offline positioning consistency. Using data of 153 Taiwanese hotel websites and the multivariate methods of confirmatory factor analysis, principal component analysis, and clustering analysis, twelve attributes under five hotel website quality constructs have been developed. Based on the hotel website quality scale, the study demonstrates three online segments of Taiwanese hotel industry, and then reveals the problem of positioning consistency of Taiwanese hotels between online website quality and offline star rating. This study explores the consideration of online-offline marketing positioning consistency and emphasizes that the service vendor's website quality plays as an online marketing thrust to acquire the subsequent service transactions strategically. (C) 2017 The Authors.