EVALUATION OF HOTEL WEBSITES FOR DISABLED PEOPLE: AN ACCESSIBILITY APPROACH

Although the evaluation of hotel website is one of the most widely researched areas in the field of tourism scholarship, very few extensive researches evaluated the websites from the disabled people's perspective. This empirical research paper examines the five-star hotel websites, what we argue are the accessibility of websites and readability of websites. This research examines the accessibility of websites in terms of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) approach by evaluation tool. The study applied a 4C approach (Cluster tendency, Cluster number, Clustering, Cluster validity) for k-means cluster analysis to the accessibility issues for understanding, classifying and inferring websites of similar characteristics. The result suggested that the majority of the hotel's websites failed to address the issue of accessibility in their website which often looked by disabled travellers. Our examination of key research gaps is concluded by arguing that accessibility and readability in the hotel website must be brought to bear on the wider evaluation as it is important for the person with disabilities as well as the person without disabilities.