The Use of Internet as a Marketing Tool

Evaluating the Websites of Spain's Top Restaurants

F. J. Miranda, S. Rubio, A. Chamorro and M. S. Janita

Business Management and Sociology Departament, Extremadura University, Badajoz, Spain

Keywords: World Wide Web, Restaurant Websites, Tourism Marketing, Content Analysis, Web Design, Internet,

Research Paper.

Abstract: The haute cuisine catering sector in Spain is faced with two facts that underscore the importance today of

their presence on the Internet. On the one hand, the quality and recognition of Spanish cuisine are fostering

the development of culinary tourism, both domestic in origin and from abroad. And on the other, 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

Web pages and provide some guidance to their designers to facilitate their use as a marketing tool. The

instrument used is the Web Assessment Index (WAI). This has been validated in other studies in the

literature, and measures the quality of a Website based on 4 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.

1 INTRODUCTION

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 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. A restaurant's presence

on the Internet can therefore be a positive instrument

for attracting customers.

Likewise, there have been many studies on the

use of the Internet as a marketing tool in the tourism

sector, but they have mostly been restricted to the

analysis either of hotels (Chan and Law, 2006;

Chiang and Jang, 2007; Dabas and Manaktola, 2007;

Kaplanidou and Vogt, 2006; Law and Cheung, 2006;

Morosan and Jeong, 2008; Noone and Mattila, 2009;

Rong et al., 2009; Schmidt et al., 2008; Vermeulen

and Seegers, 2009; Ye et al., 2009, 2011) or of

tourism destinations (Kim et al., 2007; Law and Bai,

2008; Law et al., 2010; Lee et al., 2007; Litvin et al.,

2008; Park et al., 2007; Tsang et al., 2010; Vrana

and Zafiropoulos, 2006; Wang et al., 2007; Wen,

2009). 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.

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.

While it seems clear that a restaurant's Website

design has a direct impact on its customers'

expectations and satisfaction (Wang et al. 2004), few

studies have analyzed restaurants' use of the Web as

109

J. Miranda F., Rubio S., Chamorro A. and S. Janita M..

The Use of Internet as a Marketing Tool - Evaluating the Websites of Spain’s Top Restaurants.

DOI: 10.5220/0004029001090114

In Proceedings of the International Conference on Data Communication Networking, e-Business and Optical Communication Systems (ICE-B-2012),

pages 109-114

ISBN: 978-989-8565-23-5

 2012 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

a marketing tool (Gregory et al., 2010).

Thus, 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 see if the number of stars a restaurant

received in the Guide is correlated with the quality

of its Website.

The rest of this communication is organized as

follows. Section 2 discusses the principal Website

evaluation tools that one finds in the literature, and

then describes the construction of the instrument

used in the present work which is based on the WAI

(Buenadicha et al., 2001) adapted to the restaurant

sector. Section 3 presents the results, and this is

followed by a discussion of these results and their

relevance to the sector in Sec. 4.

2 WEBSITE EVALUATION

METHODS

In recent years, there have been several important

contributions to the field of Website evaluation. For

instance, the recent review of Chiou et al. (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 et al. (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 (see

Shchiglik and Barnes, 2004; Blanca Hernández et

al., 2009) 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 and Cheng,

2009; Liu et al., 2009).

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 behaviour.

In the present study, it was decided to employ an

objective attribute-based method using independent

judges. In order to avoid the shortcomings of

previous models of this type, Buenadicha et al.

(2001) developed a new quantitative evaluation

index, the Web Assessment Index (WAI), for use in

evaluating how organizations of different types

currently use the Internet. This index has been used

successfully to assess the sites of different types of

organizations (Miranda and Bañegil, 2004; Miranda

et al., 2006, 2009, 2010). For the present work, this

index was adapted to the restaurant sector after

consultation with various experts on the Internet and

on tourism.

While there have been some previous studies

evaluating the Websites of tourism organizations

(Benckendorff and Black, 2000; Sigala, 2001; Wan,

2002; Baggio, 2003; Kozac et al., 2005; Baloglu and

Pekcan, 2006; Baggio et al., 2007), 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 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 rigour.

The WAI is based on four essential categories for

the assessment of a site's quality: visibility, speed,

navigability, and content. With this model as a basis,

the key factors in each category reflect the variables

and attributes of a Website that its users consider

important. The weights used for each category were

obtained as recommended by a Delphi study

(Miranda et al., 2006) conducted with 12

independent experts (advanced Internet users and

experts in tourism). Specifically, these weights

were: visibility (30%), speed (10%), navigability

(10%), and content (50%). In the following

subsections, we shall examine these four categories

separately.

2.1 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. One of the novelties of the present study is

that it complements the measure of popularity used

ICE-B 2012 - International Conference on e-Business

110

in previous studies with four of the new "ranking

implementers" – Google PageRanking, Alexa,

Emezeta, and Yahoo Ranking.

In the present work, the importance of each of

these tools was weighted, taking into account the

views of international experts on the Internet. The

weights used were the following: Google

PageRanking (25%), Alexa (25%), Emezeta (30%),

and Yahoo Ranking (20%).

2.2 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 ten seconds of inactivity,

after which the user will begin to perform other

tasks, redirect the search to another site, or simply

stop browsing (Cao et al., 2005). Indeed, Muylle et

al. (1998) and Hoffman and Novak (1996) already

noted in the 1990s that there was a significant

correlation between a page's loading speed and user

satisfaction.

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 (images, CSS, Java scripts, RSS, Flash, and

frames/iframes), mimicking the form in the page is

loaded in a Web browser.

2.3 Navegability

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.

Given this context, the factors used to evaluate

this category were: a permanently displayed menu

allowing quick access to the different sections from

each page; 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; a keyword search function,

allowing users to locate the information that is

available on the restaurant's site.

In the present study, the judges 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.

2.4 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 (Huizingh, 2000;

Buenadicha et al., 2001; Miranda and Bañegil, 2004;

Kozac et al., 2005; 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. 31 items were studied for each of

the restaurants' Websites.

3 RESULTS OF APPLYING THE

WAI TO SPAIN'S

RESTAURANT SECTOR

To achieve our objective, we analyzed the Websites

of the 138 Spanish restaurants included in the 2011

Michelin Guide. 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. The results therefore

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).

Figure 1: Values of the WAI.

0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.9 1.0

Mugaritz (2 stars)

Etxanobe (1 star)

Zortziko (1 star)

Tristan (1 star)

El Bulli (3 stars)

Can Fabes (3 stars)

Can Jubany (1 star)

Caelis( Ht. Palace) (1 star)

Alejandro (1 star)

Coque (1 star)

Real Balneario (1 star)

Andra Mari (1 star)

El Lago (1 star)

El Nuevo Molino (1 star)

Mas Pau (1 star)

The Use of Internet as a Marketing Tool - Evaluating the Websites of Spain's Top Restaurants

111

As a general rule, the pages whose content

downloaded rapidly were also easily navigable. The

download speeds ranged between 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. But a keyword search function was

present on only 5.1%, and only 7.2% had a site map.

The commonest informational content of the

sites corresponded to a map locating the restaurant,

the menu, and photographs of the premises. These

appeared on more than 70% of the Websites (fig 2).

Figure 2: Informational content.

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. A third of the sites offered

information on the features and 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.

With respect to communications content,

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. The ability to make reservations online

was provided by 52.6% of the sites, and e-mail

reservations by 10.9%.

Recent years have seen an evolution of Website

design towards the Web 2.0 approach. This is aimed

at fostering user participation and collaboration to

facilitate the provision of information on the Web.

In this sense, the so-called 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 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 14%

included a blog, and 10% some other tool for user

participation (newsletters, the option of making a

recommendation to a friend, etc.). The present study

found that only 20.4% of the Michelin star

restaurants had a presence in social networks

(primarily in Facebook and Twitter).

4 DISCUSSION AND

CONCLUSIONS

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 website assessment index (WAI) used in the

study has been extensively validated in other sectors.

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

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90%

Location map

Photos of the premises

Photos of dishes

Press/News

Prices

Premises (features & style)

Personnel

History

Environment

Job offers

Wine cellar

GPS

Special offers

Recipes

Publications

Video

360º photos

ICE-B 2012 - International Conference on e-Business

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with fewer stars.

As was noted at the beginning of Sec. 3, 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, we

would highlight the finding that the Websites of the

restaurants surveyed make limited use of social

networks.

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.

In agreement with other authors, we find that the

present results provide evidence that the quality of a

restaurant's Website can have a significant positive

impact on its customers' satisfaction. It is therefore

advisable to invest in increasing that quality in order

to improve customers' virtual experience and

facilitate their purchasing decisions.

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