Web Site Evaluation of Iranian Tourism and Hospitality Organizations: An E-Commerce Web Site Features Model

Iran possesses a rich range of natural, cultural, and manmade tourism resources, much of which is unique in the world. Tourism is the fastest growing industry around the world and holds the highest share of countries' GDPs compared to other industries; this presents a unique opportunity for Iran. This research focuses on evaluating the current status of Iranian tourist organization Web sites in order to study their adoption of e-commerce applications. A Web site evaluation model is used to study 207 sites to reveal the status of the tourist organizations and to find out their reasons for having a Web presence. Iran tourism's competitive advantages and weaknesses are also studied. Based on this, the weak points and missed potential of the Web sites are extracted to help managers enhance their e-commerce activities in Iran's tourism industry.