Service gap in hotel website load performance

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate how well hotel website load time performance compared against customer expectation benchmarks. In a competitive market, service interactions are important. As customers move to mobile devices, the time to load a website is a critical part of the service delivery. Long load times can lead to poor service experiences, customer frustration and lost business. Hotel website load times on both mobile and desktop devices were examined and compared to service expectations. Design/methodology/approach – The study used an online service to assess and compare website load performance using both desktop and mobile devices for 259 international hotel company and sub-brand websites.