Tourism Management 54 (2016) 541e554

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Tourism Management
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tourman

Travel web-site design: Information task-fit, service quality and

purchase intention
Adenekan (Nick) Dedeke*
D'Amore-McKim School of Business, 220 D Hayden Hall, 360 Huntington Avenue, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115-5000, USA

h i g h l i g h t s

Website design quality impacts purchase intent.

Website design quality impacts product quality.

Product quality impacts purchase intent.

Information-task fit impacts product quality.

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Several studies have explored how buyers form intentions to purchase products online. However, few
Received 18 May 2015 studies have focused on the role that information-task fit and website design quality exert on perceived
Received in revised form service quality and purchase intent. The data used for this study was gathered during experiments
1 January 2016
conducted on Amazon's Mechanical Turk's crowd sourcing platform. The results indicated that website
Accepted 1 January 2016
Available online xxx
design influenced perceived product quality and online purchase intentions. The implications of these
results for future research and website design are presented.
© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords:
Website design quality
Product quality
Empirical research
Purchase intentions
Information-task fit

1. Introduction
E-commerce websites enable firms to offer a greater product
selection and higher efficiency to customers than do physical-retail
outlets (Ghose, Smith, and Telang (2006). However, customers buy
more online owing to the effectiveness of e-commerce channels
(Carroll & Siguaw, 2003; O'Connor & Frew, 2004). Ecommerce has
also increased disintermediation (Garces, Gorgemans, Sanchez, &
Perez, 2004) and increased price competition (O'Connor, 2003)
partly because of the pricing transparency (O'Connor & Frew, 2004)
effects of the web. Several of the negative factors increase
competition and diminish customer loyalty (O'Connor & Frew,
2004). These factors have contributed to e-tourism's growth. For
example, eMarketer (2012) found that 51.6 percent of consumers
who had gone or planned to travel in the summer of 2014 used the
* Tel.: þ1 617 373 5521.
E-mail address: a.dedeke@neu.edu.
Internet to search and purchase their trips. Given the growth and
the challenges of the deployment of e-commerce technologies for
tourism, research in this area has been growing since the 1990s. In
seeking a better understanding of the impacts of e-commerce, re-
searchers have explored several broad issues. First, some studies
have investigated how website attributes could be analyzed and
quantified as website quality (Chung & Law, 2003; Morrison, Taylor,
Morrison, & Morrison, 1999). Second, other studies have investi-
gated how a specified set of individuals respond to different types
of website attributes (Shankar, Smith, & Rangaswamy, 2003; Wolf,
Hsu, & Kang, 2004). These studies explore the effect of e-commerce
technologies on behavioral attributes, such as trust and purchase
intentions. Some studies have also explored the user's acceptance
of e-commerce technologies in the tourism sector (Kim, Lee, & Law,
2008; Usoro, Shoyelu, & Kuofie, 2010).
In tourism research literature, there is the need for more in-
vestigations on the impact of website information and design on
perceived service quality and purchase intent. In some instances

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tourman.2016.01.001
0261-5177/© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
542 A. Dedeke / Tourism Management 54 (2016) 541e554
where website quality has been investigated, website information
was treated as a sub-construct of website quality (Loiacono,
Watson, & Goodhue, 2007; Wells, Valacich, & Hess, 2011). In the
literature, the composite constructs of website quality generally
aggregate assessments of the website's product information and its
non-product-related website attributes, such as, ease of use,
entertainment, visual appeal, responsiveness and internet speed,
web security and so on, under the construct (Kim & Niehm, 2009).
This framing has limited the study of the relationship between
website design, website's content and behavioral constructs, such
as purchase intent. The exploration of this relationship is the focus
of this paper.
There is anecdotal evidence that suggests that web design
should be studied more closely. For example, a survey showed that
two-thirds of e-shoppers do not shop on a poorly-designed website
and that affluent e-shoppers are even less likely to do so (Genex,
2003). Similarly, extant work shows that one in five U.S.A. online
leisure-travelers encountered problems when booking online
travel (Harteveldt, Johnson, & Tesch, 2007). Similarly, a research
report estimated that 83 million online leisure travelers did not find
the Web easy to use for planning and buying their trips (Harteveldt
et al., 2007). In addition, Lake (2013) identified 23 design problems
that are still common on travel websites.
It is to be noted that website design is one of the aspects of an e-
commerce platform over which the tour organizer has the most
influence. Furthermore, given that shoppers spent 4.58 min on
average on travel websites in 2013 (Wolfgang Digital, 2014), the
possible impact of website design on potential customers should
not be underestimated. Hence, it is plausible that, for a segment of
online customers, the opinions they form about a website's design
may impact their perceptions of product quality. World Best
Enterprises (2004) argued that website design and contents are
two of the most essential factors contributing to the success of
business websites.
Given this evidence, this paper argues that the impact of
website design is worth studying in its own right. In the literature,
the term usability has been defined as the usefulness of the
website design or the degree of ease with which users can use a
website (Nielsen, 2000). Hence, this paper defines website design
quality as the summary evaluation of a website's interface design,
and of the ease of use of menus, tables, navigation links and the
webpage layout.
During each website visit, a study found that potential cus-
tomers browsed 3.6 web pages per session to travel websites
(Wolfgang Digital, 2014). Interestingly, potential shoppers seemed
to skip over some website information and focus on information
that fitted their needs or was relevant to the tasks and questions
that they faced. Hence, this study seeks to focus on the effect of a
known, but seldom investigated, construct called information-
task fit on perceived service/product quality and purchase
intent. The premise behind this study of information-task fit is
that a website might have lots of information (informativeness)
without having the information that the user is seeking for his/
her specific task (that is, lack of information-task fit). In the
literature, information task-fit, sometimes called informational
fit-to-task, has been defined as the extent to which users perceive
that the information provided on a website meets the needs of
their tasks (Loiacono et al., 2007; Todd & Benbasat, 1992). This
paper defines information-task fit as the level of a consumer's
summary evaluation of the extent to which a website's product
information is sufficient for making judgments about the quality
of the product. This definition is related to the website informa-
tiveness construct, which is defined as the degree to which buyers
perceive that a website provides them with resourceful and
helpful information (Pavlou, Liang, & Xue, 2007). The slight
difference between the two constructs could be described as
follows. The informativeness construct is a broad concept that
depicts the types of information enabling one to resolve different
kinds of both new and common situations. In contrast,
information-task fit depicts information that is intended to enable
visitors to reduce specific, but common, task-oriented informa-
tion deficits or to resolve task-oriented inquiries. For example, a
website will have a good information-task fit if it provides po-
tential travelers with information about the name, address and
location of the hotel to be used for group tours, in addition to the
attributes of hotel rooms. However, a website would be said to
have good informativeness if it provided information to potential
customers about why the hotel was chosen, how many hotels
were in the area, and how the selected hotel competed on met-
rics, such as quality, price and service performance, when
compared with its peers.
This paper will use the tourism industry as its context. This is
because of the growing impact of web technologies in this sector.
The increased deployment of e-commerce for travel products has
broadened the scope of transactions and activities that travelers
perform online. Jang (2004) observed that online information
search has become a major trend among travelers. Law and Hsu
(2006) postulated that the use of online reservations for travel
products and services had become an important trend. Similarly,
Corigliano and Baggio (2006) argued that the quality and perfor-
mance commercial websites will increasingly need to be monitored
and improved (Law & Bai, 2006). The U.S.A. Department of Com-
merce data showed that 25.4 million passengers took leisure/hol-
iday (including holiday and visit with friends and relatives) travel in
2014. Thirty-one percent of them used Internet booking and 34
percent of them got their information from an online travel agency
source (U.S. Department of Commerce, 2015). This data confirms
that websites are still a critical competitive resource for tourism
firms.
There are two broad types of travel products to be differentiated,
organized group tours and individual tours. Organized group tours
occur when a travel organization puts together an all-inclusive trip
often lasting several days. The customers generally self-select
themselves to join organized group tours. The websites of firms
that organize group tours typically provide more information than
those that solely market flights or rental cars or hotel accommo-
dation. Websites marketing group travel must provide potential
guests with information about a broad range of services and they
have to provide sufficient information about the tour program that
they are offering.
Extant research shows that less-experienced travelers strongly
prefer organized group tours and that this market is competitive.
For example, a Boston Consulting Group's 2013 survey of young
affluent consumers revealed that while 55 percent of the re-
spondents reported that their most recent trip was an organized
group tour, about 65 percent said that they intend to travel inde-
pendently or with friends within the next five to ten years (Budde
et al., 2013). Given the fact that the group travel websites seek to
retain customers, even those who are independent travelers, any-
thing that makes their websites more effective will enable such
travel websites operators to be more successful in attracting and
retaining customers. Furthermore, given that information-task fit is
one of the constructs that this study is exploring, the websites of
group tours operators would offer a richer context for this study of
travel websites.
This study will provide a better understanding of the role that
website design and information-task fit has on the perception of
product quality and purchase intent. The findings will help man-
agers to develop more effective strategies when they improve or
rebuild their websites.
 A. Dedeke / Tourism Management 54 (2016) 541e554
2. Literature review
In the literature, several studies have focused on the impacts of
website usefulness on purchase intent and trust. San Martin and
Herrero (2012) showed that perceived website usefulness (perfor-
mance expectancy) impacted purchase intentions. Other studies
have explored the relationship between trust and the measures of
reputation, including trust seals and marks (Kim & Niehm, 2009;
Vijayasarathy & Jones, 2000). Trust was shown to impact the for-
mation of long-term relationships and the formation of intent to
purchase (Everard & Galletta, 2005; Kim & Niehm, 2009;
Vijayasarathy & Jones, 2000). Kim & Niehm (2009) explored the
relationships between information quality, the system quality, and
trust.
Duarte and Amaro (2015) found that intentions to purchase
group travel products online are determined by the customer's
attitude, compatibility and perceived risk. Hence, website infor-
mation could be viewed as the means to reduce the customer's
perceived risk. Kuo, Zhang, and Cranage (2015) found that the
presentation of visual content, such as images and logos on a
website impacted customer trust. Woodside, Vicente, and Duque
(2011) found that while destinations with small numbers of tour-
ists, relative to their populations, provided more information on
their travel websites, many destinations, with a larger number of
tourists relative to their populations, provide lesser information on
their websites. This suggests that the destinations with a smaller
number of tourists recognize the role that information plays in
attracting tourists, while destinations with larger tourists depend
on their established reputations as tourist destinations. Herrero,
Martín, and Herna
ndez (2015) showed that information content,
generated by users, could influence other users' behavior if the
information was valuable and if its source was credible, among
other things. Sparks, Perkins, and Ralf Buckley (2013) found that
reviews on online travel sites impacted customer's purchase intent.
Finally, Jeong, Oh, and Gregoire (2003) found that, for lodging in-
dustry websites, information satisfaction is a powerful determinant
for online behavioral intentions and that Web site quality is an
important antecedent of information satisfaction. Kucukusta, Law,
Besbes, and Legohe
rel (2015) found that the usefulness of infor-
mation on a tourism website was deemed by users to be more
important than its ease of use.
Despite their broad scope of studies, fewer studies in the
tourism literature have explored the role that website design spe-
cifically plays on purchase intent and information-task fit. For
example, Pallud and Straub (2014) found that website design
affected peoples' intentions to visit a museum. Also, Law and Bai
(2008) found that the website design preferences of online
browsers and of those who purchased online differed.
3. Defining the website design quality and information-task
fit
Studies relating to website quality and its impacts date back to
the late 1990s. However, in the literature the scope of website
quality construct has not been uniform. The definition of the
construct in the literature has ranged from narrow to very broad.
Some definitions of website quality often include the information
aspect, such as content richness (Palmer, 2002) or content suffi-
ciency (Chung & Law, 2003) and the ease of use or usability
(Huizingh, 2000; Palmer, 2002). Hence, in tourism literature, as in
other literature, one sometimes notices a blurring in the definition
of these terms. For example, the constructs for usability by Au
Yeung and Law (2006) and the construct proposed by Law and
Ngai (2005) for travel and hotel websites combined language, in-
formation architecture (content dimension) with user interface and
543
navigation and layout and graphics (website design elements).
Such a conflation makes it difficult to isolate the influence of
websites from that of website design. A similar issue is also evident
in the definition of website design quality. Often, the definition of
website quality is not uniformly differentiated from the definition
of website design quality. For example, while Wen (2009) defined
website design quality to include, system quality, information
quality and service quality, Lowry, Vance, Moody, Beckman, and
Read (2008) defined website quality in terms of the website a
user's general perception of navigability, aesthetics, and function-
ality of the Web site.
To avoid this problem, it is important to state how this paper will
differentiate between website quality and website design quality.
Website quality covers three dimensions. First, it includes a web-
site's technical (system) qualities, such as response time, reliability,
availability and so on (DeLone & McLean, 2003). Second, this study
includes, under the website design, quality construct attributes,
such as its navigability, interface design, graphics and user inter-
face. In a sense, our definition splits into two areas the conceptu-
alization of website usability that was proposed by Law and Ngai
(2005). It is worth mentioning that this study does not focus on
the information quality of websites, but on a task-oriented infor-
mation judgement. Information quality is a very broad concept
including multiple dimensions, such as representation quality,
contextual, accessibility, transactional and ergonomic dimensions
(Dedeke, 2000) or intrinsic, representational, accessibility,
contextual (Strong, Lee, & Wang, 1997). Information-task fit
construct, focuses on the contextual dimension of information
quality.
This rest of the paper is structured as follows. The next section
will present the research model and the hypotheses for the study.
The paper will then present the methodology that was used,
including a description of the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform,
the benefits and risks of the platform, the participants of the study,
design of the experiment, deployment of the experiment, the
measures, the four website interface designs used for the experi-
ments and the manipulation checks. The paper will then present
the results of the hypotheses testing, discussion of the results and
the implications and present the limitations and future research.
4. The research model
4.1. Website design quality and purchase intent
Fig. 1 presents the relationships that are explored in this study.
The definition of website design used in this work combines the
navigational design and visual design definitions that were used by
Cyr (2008). Website design is the navigational scheme and hierar-
chy used on a website together with its visual design, such as its
visual appeal, innovativeness, aesthetics and use of colors and
H1
H2 H3
Web site Perceived Purchase
design Product quality intenƟons
quality
H5
H4
Perceived
InformaƟon-task H6
fit
Fig. 1. Proposed research model.
544 A. Dedeke / Tourism Management 54 (2016) 541e554
shapes. As discussed earlier under Section 3, website quality,
website design and website information are viewed as distinct
areas. Therefore, when this paper discusses website design quality,
the terminology is used to capture the buyer's summary impres-
sions about website design and website features, including the
menus, logos, navigation links, colors and the webpage layout.
Palmer (2002) found that site organization, information content
and navigation are important for a website's success. Furthermore,
website design has been found to positively impact perceived ac-
cess to information, navigation experience and general perception
of a website (Balasubramanian, Konana, & Menon, 2003). Cyr
(2008) also found that visual design and information design
impacted customer satisfaction.
In the context of travel research studies, intent to purchase has
been argued as the best predictor of action (Moital, Vaughn, &
Edwards, 2009). Hence, it is important to understand the factors
that impact this variable. Extant works indicate that web design
could strengthen customer trust (Lowry et al., 2008), improve
customer satisfaction (Law & Bai, 2008) and impact the formation
of willingness or intent to purchase (Schmidt, Cantallops, & Santos,
2007). Similarly, Pallud and Straub (2014) found that the quality of
the design of a museum's website influenced the customer's
intention to visit the physical museum. Kuan, Bock, and
Vathanophas (2008) also found that website design impacted
purchase intentions. Hence, the following hypothesis is proposed:
H1. The perceived website design quality will positively affect the
purchase intent.
4.2. Website design quality and product quality
Extant literature shows that website quality is related to
perceived product quality. For example, Wells et al. (2011) found
that website quality influenced perceived product quality. This
paper argues that the same argument could be made for website
design quality. Namely, that website design quality impacts
perceived product quality. I expect that website design quality
could impact perceived product quality on two grounds. For
example, in the case of inexperienced customer, who has never
done business with an online travel organizer, one would expect
the website design quality, being more readily accessible infor-
mation, to be used by customers as a surrogate for the product
quality of the organized travel product. When customers lack
experience with a provider, they would default to using the avail-
able information to form predictions about product quality
(Zeithaml (1988).
Furthermore, this paper's argument rests on the confidence-
value premise. According to the confidence-value logic, potential
buyers are highly confident in their own ability to evaluate clearly
observable attributes rather than the unobservable ones. Hence,
potential buyers are likely to infer their product quality perceptions
from their perceptions of website design attributes (Richardson,
Dick, & Jain, 1994), because they are confident about their ability
to evaluate website designs quality. For example, Lindgaard,
Fernandes, Dudek, and Brownet (2006) demonstrated that the vi-
sual appeal of a website is often assessed in less than one second.
Such a finding supports the idea that consumers exhibit high levels
of confidence in assessing website design quality and would be
more likely to substitute these judgments for product quality as-
sessments. Consequently, I expect that the perceptions of website
design quality would affect a consumer's perception of product
quality. Hence, the following hypothesis is proposed:
H2. The perceived website design quality will positively affect the
perceived product quality.
4.3. Product quality and purchase intentions
In extant literature, both theoretical and empirical evidence
shows that perceived product-quality influences purchase in-
tentions (Boulding & Kirmani, 1993; Rao, Qu, & Ruekert, 1999; Wells
et al., 2011). When a potential customer views a product online,
especially a product with which she/he is not familiar, the customer
has to make a judgement about the quality of the service. This
impression is what this paper defines as perceived product quality.
Perceived product quality is defined as the impression of the po-
tential customer about the level of quality that a product/service
would offer, if purchased. This construct is quite relevant in the
tourism sphere, specifically because a significant number of po-
tential travelers are making a decision to buy vacations to destina-
tions with which they are not familiar. Fassnacht and Koese (2006)
argued that, in the e-commerce context, perceived product quality
is the determinant of online competitive advantage. Furthermore, Yi
and Gong (2008) found a relationship between product quality and
a traveler's purchase intentions. In addition, Mills and Morrison
(2003) found that perceived quality of the product offered by an
online travel website impacts the online experience, which in turn
impacts customer satisfaction. Similarly, Zhou, Lu, and Wang (2009)
found that product quality determined repurchase intentions. Given
these results, it is expected that this work will confirm extant
findings. Hence, the following hypothesis is proposed:
H3. The perceived product quality will positively impact the
intent to purchase.
4.4. Information-task fit
Product information includes the amount, type and form of in-
formation about the products and services offered on a web site.
When the information on a website satisfies all the needs of the
potential customer, the website is said to have a high information-
task fit; otherwise, it is said to have a low information-task fit. This
information-task fit construct is related to the concept of website
informativeness (Pavlou et al., 2007), which is the measure of the
degree to which buyers perceive that a website offers them
resourceful and helpful textual information. It is also similar to the
concept of information fitness for a task (Loiacono, Watson, &
Hoodhue, 2002), which is a measure of the degree to which the
information provided meets the task needs of a customer.
Information-task fit is different from product diagnostics (Dimoka,
Hong, & Pavlou, 2012; Gregg & Walczak, 2008), because it is not
focused primarily on the product; rather, it accommodates a
broader range of information that might be required for a task,
including the seller-related content.
4.5. Website design quality and information-task fit
There are at least two ways in which website design quality could
impact the perception of information-task fit. First, the website
design of the navigational scheme could help or hinder the access to
different sections of a website (DeWulf, Schillewaert, Muylle, &
Rangarajan, 2006). Similarly, the website design could make it
easier for the organized tour vendor to include more content on a
website in addition to a broad variety of information formats. A prior
study showed that the dimensions of website design attributes,
including interactivity and ease of use, significantly influence the
perceived information quality (Kim & Niehm, 2009). Furthermore,
the way that information is listed (Gregg & Walczak, 2008) and
presented is also expected to make it easier to select and locate
information, consequently enhancing the perception of the
information-task fit. Hence, the following hypothesis is proposed:
 A. Dedeke / Tourism Management 54 (2016) 541e554
H4. The perceived website design quality will positively affect the
perceived information-task fit.
4.6. Information-task fit and product quality
Gregg and Walczak (2008) showed that product information
and background information, referred to as a part of the e-image,
do impact a customer's willingness to transact business on a
website. Another study has shown that long textual descriptions
increase the buyer's utility for products (Kauffman & Wood, 2006).
Multimedia formats have been shown to impact how a website is
experienced (Hulten, Broweus, & Van Dijk, 2009). Similarly, extant
work has shown that a low information-task fit impacts buyer
behaviors. In summary, the kind of information that is provided on
a website and the richness of the information impacts how people
experience the website. Vargo and Lusch (2004) argued that the
triggering of a potential buyer's sensory experience enables the
individual to develop behavioral, emotional, cognitive, relational
and symbolic values towards the products or services offered. In-
formation that is provided on websites is used to influence the
consumer's perceptions of value (Lohse & Spiller, 1998). Hence, the
stated hypothesis is the following:
H5. The perceived information-task fit will positively affect the
perceived product quality.
4.7. Information-task fit and purchase intent
Intuition suggests that website information must fit the ex-
pectations of potential customers if they are to form the intention
to purchase. Specifically, in the tourism context, if a travel website
lacks specific information that a potential customer seeks, she or he
will likely not form the intention to purchase that travel product.
Jeong et al. (2003) found that online information impacted cus-
tomers' behavioral intentions. Some studies report a positive as-
sociation between product information and the attitude toward a
web site (Kwon, Kim, & Lee, 2002). Product information also in-
fluences the attitude of customers towards online shopping (Wang,
Beatty, & Foxx, 2004), and the amount of online shopping that they
do (Kwak, Fox, & Zinkhan, 2002). Chiu, Hsieh, and Kao (2005) and
Liang and Chen (2009) found that information quality impacted
customers' behavioral intentions.
Wen (2009) argues that both the quality and quantity of infor-
mation provided matters. For example, while the provision of suf-
ficient product information might help a user to form impressions
about product quality, the provision of user experience information,
such as reviewer reviews, would likely help some users to overcome
their uncertainties of lingering product risks. The work of Amaro and
Duarte (2015) confirmed that perceived product risk is positively
related to the intentions to purchase travel products online. There is
evidence in the literature that the provision of review and recom-
mendation information, related to product experiences, impacted
customer perceptions of the websites (Kumar & Benbasat, 2006).
Thus, the following hypothesis is proposed:
H6. The perceived information-task fit will positively affect a
consumer's intention to purchase a product.
5. Method
5.1. The experimental system: Amazon Mechanical Turk platform
The Amazon Mechanical Turk (‘aka’ Amazon Turk) platform is a
crowd-sourcing platform that permits people who have projects
545
(requesters) to post their jobs online for workers (turk workers) to
perform for a fee. For this study, the following performance metrics
were set as the minimum eligibility. The worker had to be in the
USA and had to have successfully completed at least 500 turk
projects. The worker should also have a lifetime task-acceptance
rating of 95 percent or higher. The fee that was paid to the partic-
ipants in the study was set at $1.40 and the task completion time
was set to one hour. The fee was set at $1.40, because a review of
web postings made by U.S.A.-based turk workers and Internet-
based chats with a few of them, revealed that U.S.A. turk workers
had a reservation wage of $1.38, about a $4.80 hourly wage. Below
this amount, most of them would not accept a task.
5.2. Use of web platforms for research experiments and studies:
benefits and risks
Researchers are increasingly-using Internet technologies,
including Amazon Turk, for academic research (Mason & Suri,
2012). The Amazon Turk platform has been successfully been
used to conduct researchers studies in different fields, including
economics (Hossain & Morgan, 2006), sociology (Centola, 2010)
and psychology (Birnbaum, 2000; Nosek, 2007). Also, some studies
have showed that Internet studies had comparable results to those
conducted under laboratory conditions (Birnbaum, 2000; Horton,
Rand, & Zeckhauser, 2011) and to those conducted under class-
room conditions (Sparks et al., 2013).
There are a few advantages in using Amazon Turk for experi-
mental research. The first is that a large number of potential par-
ticipants would see the experiment. In 2007, it was reported that
there were 100,000 Amazon Turk workers in 100 countries (Pontin,
2007). Second, the completion time for each run of an online
experiment is a fraction of the time needed to complete a labora-
tory experiment. As with any online project, one has to take certain
precautions to protect the integrity of the data. For this project, I
took specific steps to eliminate multiple submissions by any indi-
vidual. I also took steps to eliminate the likelihood that the survey
form would be filled by software programs called “bots”. Lastly, to
mitigate responder bias, the survey information encouraged the
participant to give honest answers and the payment was not based
on how a participant rated the sites.
5.3. Participants
The online experiments for this study were carried out on the
Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. This platform will be described
in the next section. The population of this study consisted of those
eligible workers who voluntarily made the decision to be part of the
study. In all, 415 submissions were received. After the submissions
were reviewed, only 340 (82 percent) of submissions were usable
for the study. Thirty-seven submissions were rejected, because they
made one or more of the following errors: wrong or missing survey
codes, omission of survey questions, and/or inclusion of mostly the
same responses for all survey questions. Thirty-eight survey sub-
missions were not used, because the time-stamp on the work
revealed that the respondent spent less than 300 s on the task,
suggesting that the responses were rushed. The usable sample
consisted of 58% males and 42% females. Of the respondents, 85
percent were between the ages of 18e45 years. The annual
household income of 75 percent of the respondents was between
$12,500 and $74,999. Based on the U.S. Department of Commerce
(2015) statistics, the demographics of leisure/vacation travelers in
2014 were structured as follows: average age was 44.7 years for
females and 45.3 years for males. The median annual household
income was $95,000 and the mean annual household income was
$119, 354. The average number of nights spent outside the country
546 A. Dedeke / Tourism Management 54 (2016) 541e554
was 10 days (U.S. Department of Commerce, 2015). Given that the
sample in this study covered people with lower annual household
incomes than the 2014 U.S. travelers, an additional analysis was
carried out with a research sub-sample that was closer to the de-
mographics of the 2014 travelers. This additional analysis was made
to ensure that the conclusions of the study were valid for a repre-
sentative sample. The sub-sample was used for the representa-
tiveness analysis where annual household incomes were higher
than $84, 375. The first set of experiments was carried out between
April and May 2013 and the second set in August 2013.
5.4. Design of the experiment
This study was designed to be a quasi-experimental study,
rather than a fully-controlled laboratory study. The method was not
designed to use an “ideal” website as a control condition; rather,
the experiment was designed to deploy several different website
designs and to compare user evaluations across the websites. That
being said, the study adopted key practices that are typical of
experimental studies. First, the assignment of participants to the
each of the website interfaces was made randomly. Second, the
study participants had to interact with the pages of the website and
perform simple activities before they could fill in the survey
questionnaire. Third, manipulation checks were carried out to
ensure that the interface treatments were effective. Given the
exploratory nature of the study, an incomplete factorial design was
adopted. However, it should be noted that the use of a factorial
design was not required for all experiments. As shown in Collins,
Dziak, and Li (2009), many experimental designs that are in com-
mon use in intervention science are incomplete factorials. Thus, the
design of our experiment is more closely aligned to a comparative
treatment design (Behar & Borkovec, 2003).
5.5. Procedure: deploying experiments on Amazon Turk
The deployment of online experiments on Amazon Turk
occurred in several steps. First, a requester account was created for
the project on the Amazon Turk. Second, the survey questions for
the research were created using the HTML and CSS capabilities of
the Amazon Turk's platform. Third, JavaScript programming was
used to create a code that would randomly assign one of the
websites to each worker participating in the study. Fourth, the in-
structions for the experiment were created and posted on Amazon
Turk's portal. Fifth, all the components of the experiment, including
the instructions page, websites, Java script and survey, were all
linked together in the sequence that each participant would see
and process them. According to the sequence, each respondent had
to read the task instructions and accept the task, at which time she/
he was randomly assigned one of the websites. She/he had to
complete few browsing activities that would expose them to the
pages of the website. Then, the participant had to fill the exit sur-
vey. A trial run was made to check that all the parts were working
well. Then, the real experiment was run.
5.6. Measures
The constructs for the study were adapted from existing vali-
dated scales whenever possible and were provided together with
the scale anchors and sources in Fig. 2. Three constructs of the
study, namely, website design, innovation and information-task fit,
were adopted from the work of Loiacono et al. (2002, 2007).
Website design (visual appeal and design) and innovation were
measured using three manifest variables, respectively. Overall
website design quality was measured using two reflective items.
These were adapted from the works of Everard and Galletta (2005)
and Wells et al. (2011).
I measured the product quality according to the measures used
by Boulding and Kirmani (1993), Rao et al. (1999) and Wells et al.
(2011). The purchase intention construct was measured using
items that assessed a person's likelihood to use a website to pur-
chase products (Loiacono et al., 2002; Vargo & Lusch, 2004). Con-
trol measures for age, gender, prior visits to France and income
were also included in the survey.
5.7. Description of the websites for the experiments
5.7.1. Designing the website interfaces 1 and 2
It is noted that the approach of using multiple website treat-
ments for research is not new. Well et al. (2011) used this approach
and Lowry et al. (2008) used website manipulations in studying the
impact of websites logos branding perceptions. For this exploratory
study, four website interfaces were developed. They were designed
to be meaningfully different from each other. The contents of the
websites were borrowed from the websites of companies that
offered organized trips to France. The Website Design 1 had six web
pages, namely, welcome, vacation schedule, hotels information,
customer video, tour guide video and the firm's contact informa-
tion (see screenshots of website Design 1 and 4 in the appendix. See
Website Design 1 here: http://circle.bostonresearchzone.com/
rhdh6QQ.html; see Website Design 2 here: http://circle.
bostonresearchzone.com/rhdh6.html).
I operationalized innovation in the design by using interactive
web tables to present information and the use of Cascading Style
Sheets (CSS3) for styling the pages. The responsive table enabled
the user to reduce the content of information viewed on the page.
The table would also automatically reorganize its contents to adapt
to the device screen size of the user. I operationalized website
design (appeal and design) in the following ways. A CSS 3 coding
was used to develop the appealing navigation tabs and the logo for
the website. Matching colors were selected for the website. Pictures
were also included to enhance the visual appeal of the pages.
The Information task-fit was operationalized by the inclusion of
information about the vacation. The information for Website
Design 1 included a two-minute welcome page video. The
customer page had a two-minute video testimony about a family
that had been on the France vacation. The tour guides page
included a two-minute video featuring one of the tour guides for
the French vacation. The vacation schedule page contained detailed
descriptions about the daily itinerary of the vacation. The schedule
page also had several hyperlinks to videos and interactive activities
related to activities associated with the 13-day France vacation. The
hotel information page presented two actual hotels, a photo gallery
of the hotels and in-depth details of the guest rooms, amenities and
the respective hotel locations. The four star-ratings of the hotels
were also included.
Towards the bottom of the webpage for hotel information, all
the names, star ratings and cities of the other hotels available
during the vacation were included. In addition, hyperlinks to each
hotel's website were provided describing the amenities, guest
rooms and other features. I extracted 41 customer feedbacks and
ratings from the website of an organizer of group tours to France.
The information was posted on the customer webpage of the
Website Design 1. In addition, an appealing picture of a young child
on holiday and appealing marketing messages were added on top
of the video on the tour guides page. Lastly, the contact webpage of
Website Design 1 provided detailed information about the location,
operating hours, telephone numbers, fax numbers and several
email addresses for contacts in the vacation organizer. Website 2
was created by the removal of some of the features of Website
design 1 (See Table 1).
 A. Dedeke / Tourism Management 54 (2016) 541e554 547

Design and Visual Appeal (VISUAL) Loiacono et al. (2007) [7 Strongly agree, to 1 strongly
disagree]
The Website is visually pleasing.
The Website displays visually pleasing design.
The Website is visually appealing.

InnovaƟveness (INNOV) Loiacono et al. (2007) [7 Strongly agree, to 1 strongly disagree]

The Website is innova ve.
The Website design is innova ve.
The Website is crea ve.

InformaƟonal-Task Fit (FIT) Loiacono et al. (2007) [7 Strongly agree, to 1 strongly disagree]
The informa on on the Website is pre y much what I need to carry out my tasks.
The Website adequately meets my informa on needs.
The informa on on the Website is effec ve.

Product Quality (adapted from Boulding and Kirmani, 1993; Rao et al., 1999; Wells et al., 2011)
The vaca on appears to me to be well cra ed. [7 Strongly agree to 1 strongly disagree]
I perceive the vaca on offered at the website to be of high quality. [7 Strongly agree to 1
strongly disagree]
I perceive that the experience offered by the vaca on would be durable. [7 Strongly agree to 1
strongly disagree] (new)

Purchase IntenƟon (adapted from Loiacono et al., 2011; Van der Heijden & Verhagen, 2004;
Wells et al., 2011) [7 Strongly agree to 1 strongly disagree]
If you were in the market for a vaca on to France, how likely are you to purchase the vaca on
offered on this website?
If you were in the market for a vaca on in the future, how likely are you to purchase similar
vaca ons offered by this firm?
If your friends were in the market for a France vaca on, how likely are you to recommend this
site to them?

Website Design Quality (Everard & Galle a, 2005) [7 Strongly agree, to 1 strongly disagree]
Overall how would you rate the quality of the site?
I would rate the website as being of high quality?

Fig. 2. Measures of the study.

5.7.2. Designing the website interfaces 3 and 4
Website Design 3 had six web pages, namely, welcome, vacation
schedule, hotels information, customer video, tour guide video and
contact information. To make the design less visually-appealing, its
logo was in plain text. However, the page still had visually-
appealing navigation tabs. It also had small pictures of a tree. On
the welcome page, the welcome video was replaced with the
transcribed text of the video's audio message. A small picture of a
tree was also added to the page. The length of the text descriptions
relating to the vacation schedule was reduced. The schedule page of
Website Design 3 also had no hyperlinks to videos and places to be
visited. The schedule page also did not include a responsive table.
Rather, it had a reduced scope of travel information for the 13-day
vacation and the information was provided in plain text. The hotel
page was the same as that of Website Design 1. However, only the
names and the locations of two out of the seven hotels for the
vacation were included on the page. There were no hyperlinks to
any of the websites of the hotels associated with the organized tour.
On the customer page, the video was replaced with the transcribed
text of the video's audio. Similarly, on the tour guides page, the
video content was replaced with the transcribed text of the video's
audio message. Lastly, the contact page provided much-reduced
information. It only provided information about the location,
operating hours and two phone numbers for the organizer of the

Table 1
Summary of the experimental treatments.

Website design 1 Website design 2 Website design 3 Website design 4

Innovation
- Responsive HTML table Yes Yes No No
Website design (appeal and design)
- CSS logo and navigation tabs Yes Yes No No
- Pictures Yes No Yes Yes
Information-task fit
- Vacation schedule High High Medium Low
- Hotels details High High Medium Low
- Firm's contact information High High Medium Low
- Online ads showing a customer and a tour guide (video) Yes Yes No No
- Customer feedback and ratings of prior vacation activities (text) Yes No No No
548 A. Dedeke / Tourism Management 54 (2016) 541e554
travel product. The Website Design 4 was created by the removal of
some of the features of Website Design 3 (See Table 1). The inclu-
sion of four different website designs would enable this study to
explore whether the hypotheses being studied were consistent
across different website designs, (see screenshots of Website 4 in
the appendix. See Website Design 3 here: http://oval.
bostonresearchzone.com/rldl4.html; see Website Design 4 here:
http://oval.bostonresearchzone.com/rldl4qq.html).
5.8. Constructing the website interfaces
The focus of the website interfaces development was to create
meaningfully different versions, to have variety, and not create
exemplars for a factorial study. Textual information is the funda-
mental method of presenting online information. When text is used
online, one could differentiate between websites that have more or
less information. Hence, in constructing website interfaces that
vary in website information, the study varied the textual elements
for the vacation schedule, details of hotels, vendor's contact infor-
mation and the customer feedback about a vacation product. Thus,
for interfaces 1 to 4, the content varied from high to low
information.
The literature also indicates that the leanness of text and static
images limit it from conveying rich information, such as the dy-
namic characteristics of products (Jiang & Benbasat, 2007). The
literature proposes that multimedia features should be used to
enrich online content (Raney, Arpan, Pashupati, & Brill, 2003).
Online ads and video clips were used to vary the interactive content
across the four interfaces. Empirical studies have concluded that
different presentation formats impact consumers' product under-
standing, attitudes toward products (Jiang & Benbasat, 2005; Li,
Daugherty, & Biocca, 2003; Raney et al., 2003).
Several studies found that in some visual designs (Kim, Lee, &
Choi, 2003; Scheirer & Picard, 1999), visually appealing content
provoked emotional feelings. The four interfaces were developed to
have varied aesthetic attributes by the design of the logos, navi-
gation elements and pictures (Perdue, 2001). Innovation was varied
by the use of web development technology that enhanced the
manipulation of a web page table with its content on a page,
enabling easier navigation (Tan, Xie, & Li, 2003).
5.9. Manipulation check
A manipulation check of the effectiveness of the treatments was
conducted, and its results showed that the treatments were effec-
tive. I used a different population for the manipulation check than
was used for the main study. Furthermore, a manipulation test was
conducted for each of the four treatments of the study. A survey
was created that included the following items, (1) the website
provides sufficient details about the schedule of the trip, (2) The
website includes detailed feedback from prior customers, (3) The
website includes several videos on the Schedule and Our Tour
Guide tabs, (4) the table on the Schedule tab has an innovative
design, (5) the website provides sufficient information about the
hotels used for the trip, (6) the Our Tour Guide tab has a visually
appealing picture, (7) the logo and the navigation tabs are visually-
appealing. The responses were measured using a 7-point Likert
scale with 1 ¼ strongly disagree and 7 ¼ strongly agree. Fifty per-
sons compared the two treatments (1 and 2) that were used for
Study 1 and a different set of fifty people compared the treatments
that were used in Study 2. For Study 1, the mean differences for the
two interfaces were 2.7 for the presence of customer feedback and
2.44 for the presence of an appealing picture. The difference was
significant (p < 0.01) using both a t-test for equality of means and
Levene's test for equality of variances. For the other two treatments
in (3 and 4), the mean differences for the two websites were 2.85
for the presence of a detailed customer feedback; 2.63 for suffi-
ciency of the contents in the schedule; 2.63 for sufficiency of hotel
information and 2.04 for appeal of pictures on the website. The
differences for customer feedback, hotel information and picture
were significant (p < 0.01) using both a t-test for equality of means
and Levene's test for equality of variances. The differences in the
visual appeal of the logo and navigation bar and in the innova-
tiveness of the website were significant (p < 0.05). The difference in
the means of the schedule information was not significant. Overall,
the results of the manipulation test showed that the treatments
were effective.
6. Results
6.1. Structural model
SmartPLS (Ringle, Wende, & Becker, 2015) software was used to
conduct the Partial Least Squares (PLS) structural model (PLS-SEM)
analyses for this study. PLS structural modeling is suitable for an
exploratory study, such as this study, because the approach is
capable of uncovering predictive causal relationships between
variables. The PLS eSEM method is also suitable for our research,
because it enables us to assess the convergence of the variables in
the model. The PLS-SEM method is also capable of handling com-
plex models without placing too many restrictions on the distri-
butional structure of the data (Ringle et al., 2015).
The following settings were used for the PLS analyses. The path-
weighting scheme for the inner weights estimation and the data
was standardized (Mean ¼ 0; Variance ¼ 1). The maximum itera-
tion for stopping the algorithm was set to 300. The initial weight
was set to 1 as suggested by Hair, Ringle, and Sarstedt (2011). The
path model diagram for the structural model is shown in Fig. 3. An
essential criterion for understanding the structural model is the
coefficient of determination (R2) of the endogenous latent vari-
ables. R2 values of 0.19, 0.33 and 0.67 are described as weak,
moderate and substantial respectively in academic literature (Chin,
1998).
6.2. Assessing collinearity
I investigated possible collinearity between each set of predictor
variables. A collinearity problem exists if the VIF is above 5 (Hair,
Hult, Ringle, & Sarstedt, 2014). Based on Table 2 below, collin-
earity was not an issue.
6.3. Assessing significance of path coefficients
The bootstrapping analysis was used to estimate the statistical
significance of the path coefficients in our structural model. Using
the SmartPLS 3 software (Ringle et al., 2015), the bootstrapping
analysis drew 5000 sub-samples from the 340 cases used in the
study. The stop criterion of 7 was used. The analysis was run with
the no-sign-change option as recommended by Hair et al. (2011).
The t-statistics in Table 3 indicated that all the path coefficients of
the model, except one, namely the relationship between
information-task fit and purchase intent, were statistically signifi-
cant. All the t-statistics were above the critical t-value of 2.57,
implying that the relationships were highly significant at the level
of one percent (p < 0.01; two-sided test).
The analysis of the significance of the outer models was also
carried out. The results showed that all the paths in the outer model
were significant (the data table for this result was not included).
Therefore, both the results of the inner and outer models confirmed
that the path coefficients were strongly significant.
 A. Dedeke / Tourism Management 54 (2016) 541e554 549

Fig. 3. Structural regression model results (N ¼ 340).

Table 2 6.4. Assessing the coefficient of determination, effect size, and

Collinearity statistics (variance inflation factors (VIF)). predictive relevance
InfoTastFit PurchIntent ServQual WebDQual

InfoTaskFit 2.1 1.57

Innov
PurchIntent
ServQual 2.2
VisualApp
WebDQual 1 1.7 1.57
The path model coefficients showed that website design quality
had a strong effect on both information-task fit (0.60) (see H4) and
purchase intent (0.43) (see H1). The information-task fit had a
stronger effect on product quality (0.51) (see H3) than did the
website design quality (0.31) (see H2). Product quality had a
stronger impact on purchase intent (0.34) (see H3) than did
information-task fit (0.13) (see H6). In sum, website design quality,
information-task fit and product quality explained 63.8 percent, a
substantial proportion, of the variance in the purchase intent var-
iable. In summary, hypotheses 1 to 5 of the study were confirmed
by these results. The path coefficient between information-task fit
and purchase intent was not significant. Hence, hypothesis H6 was
not supported by the results. The confidence intervals confirm the
significance of the supported relationships. Table 3 shows that only
in the case of hypothesis 6 did the zero fell between the lower and
upper confidence interval.
Fig. 3 shows that the coefficient of determination for purchase
1.84 intent, website design quality, product quality and information-
task fit were 63.8, 65.3, 54.9 and 36.3 percent, respectively. Hair
et al. (2011) suggest that R2 values of 0.25, 0.5 and 0.75 for
1.84
endogenous latent variables be described as weak, moderate and
substantial, respectively. Hence, the first three R2 values were
substantial and the one for information-task fit was moderate. This
suggests that the model has a high level of predictive accuracy for
the latent variables.
The effect size f2 was used to assess the contributions of the
exogenous constructs to the latent variable's respective R2 values.
Cohen (1988) recommends that f2 values of 0.02, 0.15 and 0.35 be
considered small, medium and large effects, respectively. The re-
sults showed that the relationship between Information task-fit
and purchase intent had a small effect (0.02). The relationships
relationship between product quality and purchase intent and be-
tween website design quality and product quality and between
website design quality and purchase were medium (0.13e0.29) and
those of the two other relationships (Visual appeal / web design
quality and web design quality / information-task fit) had large
effects sizes (higher than 0.37).
Furthermore, the study explored the predictive relevance (Q2) of
the latent constructs of our model, as recommended by Chin (1998)
and Hair et al. (2011). The SmartPLS 3's blindfolding process was
used for this analysis. An omission distance of 7 was used. A model

Table 3
Bootstrapping analysis and hypotheses testing.

Path coefficient 99% confidence interval T statistics Hypothesis Supported

WebDQual / PurchIntent 0.43*** [0.30, 0.55] 9.39 H1 Yes

WebDQual / ProdQual 0.31*** [0.18, 0.43] 6.26 H2 Yes
ProdQual / PurchIntent 0.34*** [0.2, 0.46] 7.06 H3 Yes
WebDQual / InfoTaskFit 0.60*** [0.51, 0.68] 19.8 H4 Yes
InfoTaskFit / ProdQual 0.51*** [0.37, 0.64] 9.29 H5 Yes
InfoTaskFit / PurchIntent 0.13 [0.005, 0.26] 2.49 H6 No

P***<0.01.
550 A. Dedeke / Tourism Management 54 (2016) 541e554
is said to have a predictive relevance if the communality (Q2) is
greater than zero (Hair et al., 2011). The cross-validated redun-
dancy, the Cv-redundancy (Q2), is a communality measure whereby
the endogenous manifest variables are predicted indirectly from
their respective latent variable using the structural relationships
(Tenenhaus, Esposito Vinzi, Chatelin, & Lauro, 2005). For this study,
Cv values were 0.32 for information-task fit, 0.57 for purchase
intent, 0.42 for service quality and 0.63 for web design quality. Q2
values of 0.02, 0.15 and 0.35 are deemed to be small, medium and
large predictive relevance respectively. Hence, the Q2 values show
that the model has strong predictive relevance.
6.5. Analysis of representative sample: structural model for high-
income sub-sample
The analysis was run for a sub-sample that was similar to the
demographical data of vacation travelers in the U.S.A. in 2014 (U.S.
Department of Commerce, 2015). The sub-sample included re-
spondents who were in the top two classes for annual household
income [$87,500e99,999] and [$100,000 or more]. The sample size
was 69. PLS analysis and Bootstrapping analyses were executed for
the sample. The results of the bootstrapping analysis are shown in
Table 4. The results in the table show that all the relationships of
the research model were significant.
The confidence intervals in Table 4 demonstrate that all the
paths coefficients were statistically significant. Collinearity statis-
tics were evaluated using the VIF values. The VIF values varied
between 1 and 2.01. Given that the VIF values were below 5,
collinearity was not an issue in the analysis. Hence, given that the
hypotheses were also confirmed when a representative sub-sample
was analyzed, it was concluded that the results are robust.
6.6. Assessing the validity and reliability of the model
I used the outer loadings (table not included) to review the
relationship between the reflective latent variables and their in-
dicators. The loadings were all above the threshold value of 0.708
(Everard & Galletta, 2005). The lowest outer loading was 0.83. I
evaluated the reliability of the composite factors using data that are
presented in Table 5. The results showed that the latent variables
had high levels of internal consistency. The high internal consis-
tency of the latent variables is also supported by the high values of
the Cronbach's alpha. They are all much higher than the 0.60
minimum threshold recommended by Nunnally (1967).
The convergent validity assessment was completed using the
Average Variance Extracted (AVE) values. The lowest Average
Variance Extracted (AVE) value in Table 5 was 0.79, thus exceeding
the minimum threshold of 0.5, as recommended by Fornell and
Table 4
PLS Structural Equation Model Results: High annual household income sample.
Dependent Var. Independent Var. N ¼ 69
R2 (Beta, T-statistics) [99% conf. interval]
PurchInt 0.55
ServQual (0.36***, 6.27) [0.21, 0.508]
WebDQ (0.497***, 9.94) [0.36, 0.63]
WebDQ 0.60
VisualApp (0.53***, 8.2) [0.36, 0.70]
Innov (0.29***, 4.3) [0.11, 0.48]
ServQual 0.37
WebDQ (0.26***, 4.42) [0.1, 0.42]
InfTaskFit (0.425***, 5.9) [0.22, 0.59]
InfTaskFit 0.27
WebDQ (0.52***, 11.6) [0.4, 0.63]
***
Significant at 0.001 level.
Larcker (1981) and Hair et al. (2014). The data in Table 6 was
used to assess the discriminant validity according to the Fornell-
Larker (1981) criterion. The values on the diagonal of Table 5 are
the square roots of the AVEs of the latent variables.
As shown in Table 6, the square root of each construct's AVE was
higher than its correlations with the other constructs. This implies
that the model has discriminant validity.
The proposed model's discriminant validity was also examined
using cross-loadings. A model is deemed to have discriminant
validity if the correlations between each construct and its respec-
tive indicators are higher than all other cross-loadings (Hair et al.,
2014). Table 7 shows that the discriminant validity of the model
is established, because each indicator's loading on its construct is
higher than all its cross loadings with other constructs.
7. Discussion
7.1. Theoretical and practical contributions
The objective of this research was to understand the relation-
ships between the key variables that impact the formation of pur-
chase intention on travel websites. Specifically, the study explored
the impact of perceived website design quality, perceived product
quality and perceived information-task fit on the purchase inten-
tion. The results showed that the latent variables were positively
related to the purchase intention. In particular, the results showed
that website design quality significantly impacted perceived pur-
chase intention, perceived product quality and perceived
information-task fit. The results of the study also showed that
website design quality, perceived product quality and perceived
information-task fit has predictive relevance for purchase intent.
The research also showed that these results were significant for all
the four types of websites that were included in the study, with the
exception of a single path, in Website Design 4. This implied that
the results agreed with the results of Lee and Lin (2005) who found
that website design positively influenced perceived service quality.
It also agreed with the finding of Ranganathan and Ganapathy
(2002) who had empirically established that website design posi-
tively affected purchase intention.
The results extend the findings of Herrero et al. (2015) and
Sparks et al. (2013) by showing that different kinds of website in-
formation, not just user-generated content, impacts behavioral
intentions. Furthermore, one can conclude that the result is
coherent with the findings of Jeong et al. (2003) who found that
information satisfaction is a powerful determinant of online
behavioral intentions. If information-task fit is high, it is expected
that customer information satisfaction will be high. The results of
this study are somewhat different from that of Kucukusta et al.
(2015) who found that the usefulness of information on a tourism
website was deemed by users to be more important than its ease-
of-use. Our findings imply that information-task fit's relationship to
product quality is stronger than the relationship between website
design quality and product quality. Also, the results imply that
website design quality almost equally strongly impacts both
Table 5
Composite indicator Attributes.
AVE Composite reliability R square Cronbach's alpha
InfoTaskFit 0.88 0.96 0.36 0.94
Innov 0.84 0.94 0.00 0.90
PurchIntent 0.91 0.97 0.63 0.95
ProdQual 0.79 0.92 0.54 0.87
VisualApp 0.94 0.98 0.00 0.97
WebDQual 0.96 0.98 0.65 0.96
 A. Dedeke / Tourism Management 54 (2016) 541e554 551

Table 6
Correlations and square root of AVEs.

InfoTaskFit Innov PurchIntent ServQual VisualApp WebDQual

InfoTaskFit 0.94
Innov 0.40 0.91
PurchIntent 0.63 0.51 0.95
ServQual 0.69 0.37 0.70 0.89
VisualApp 0.52 0.67 0.62 0.53 0.97
WebDQual 0.60 0.71 0.72 0.61 0.76 0.98

Square roots of AVE are shown on the diagonal in bold font.

Table 7
Cross loadings.

InfoTaskFit Innov PurchIntent ServQual VisualApp WebDQual

INFOFIT_10 0.944 0.387 0.599 0.639 0.501 0.590

INFOFIT_11 0.954 0.353 0.570 0.621 0.467 0.538
INFOFIT_12 0.932 0.401 0.614 0.711 0.515 0.574
INNOV_4 0.354 0.921 0.454 0.341 0.577 0.610
INNOV_5 0.360 0.940 0.456 0.325 0.638 0.663
INNOV_6 0.396 0.892 0.514 0.372 0.642 0.691
PINT_17 0.588 0.479 0.957 0.683 0.567 0.653
PINT_18 0.617 0.472 0.958 0.681 0.592 0.675
PINT_19 0.603 0.534 0.950 0.650 0.630 0.744
SQUAL_13 0.689 0.403 0.629 0.905 0.518 0.599
SQUAL_14 0.649 0.362 0.705 0.928 0.519 0.612
SQUAL_15 0.513 0.224 0.529 0.839 0.358 0.415
VAPP_1 0.500 0.642 0.618 0.508 0.972 0.737
VAPP_2 0.518 0.661 0.592 0.530 0.966 0.738
VAPP_3 0.510 0.665 0.608 0.503 0.970 0.737
WQUAL_20 0.610 0.703 0.724 0.624 0.759 0.984
WDQUAL_21 0.57 0.70 0.70 0.59 0.73 0.984

Bold fonts show that all the measurement items load heavily on their respective constructs.

information-task fit and purchase intent. The findings also extend
the work, Pallud and Straub (2014), which found that website
design affected peoples' intentions to visit a museum. This study
shows that website design also impacts purchase intentions.
The results imply a number of recommendations. First, they
suggest that e-retailers should be careful not to underestimate the
impact of having a website that manifests an appealing design,
given that this attribute impacts the formation of purchase in-
tentions. This suggests a number of practical implications for travel
companies. Namely, that it may make sense for travel companies to
permit their customers to rate the appeal of their websites before
they are launched. In many cases, this might require a modification
of the website development process, such that the voice of the
customer is brought in early in the process, when key decisions are
made in regard to the website design.
Second, the findings of the study also imply that e-retailers
should not overestimate the impact of a well-designed website on
perceived product quality. As it turns out, information-task fit has a
stronger influence on perceived product quality than does website
design quality. Pragmatically, this implies that travel websites
should always be evaluated to ensure that all the information
different categories of customers may need are provided on the
website. A travel website with a high information-task fit would
exhibit a stronger impact on the perception of product quality than
would a website with a low information-task fit.
Third, the results of this paper suggest that travel website de-
signs should be carefully evaluated relative to their impacts on
information-task fit. A website's appeal should not merely be in its
coloring, images and styling. Rather, the navigation design and all
other relevant features that make the finding and consumption of
information easier should be viewed as critical. A key component of
improving information-task fit is to ensure that the navigation
systems enable easy access to the information provided on the
website.
Finally, this study used Amazon Turk to conduct the research on
websites. This research deployment is not yet widespread in In-
formation Systems literature. The study shows that the use of
crowd-sourcing platforms could achieve results that are congruent
with those achieved when using traditional laboratory-based
approaches.
8. Limitations and future research
This study, as with all research projects, has a number of limi-
tations. Though this study used a more diverse population than
studies using undergraduate/graduate students, our experiments
did not have a complex design. Hence, the participants were not
asked to complete complex website exercises. Furthermore, the use
of an online population might be limited in generalizability, if the
population is too different from the general U.S.A. population.
Also, this research did not investigate how videos, text and au-
dios impacted the perceived different information-task fit con-
structs. This is left for future research. In addition, I focused on two
manifest variables for website design quality. Future research could
explore the influence of other variables. Future work could also
expand the number of manifest variables used in the innovation
factor. Similarly, such studies could explore the role that pricing has
on the formation of purchase-intent for different service products.
552 A. Dedeke / Tourism Management 54 (2016) 541e554

Acknowledgments Appendix 1

The author wishes to thank the anonymous reviewers for their Study websites: treatment websites
valuable suggestions and comments. I also thank the Editor-in-
Chief, Professor Chris Ryan, for his input and support during the
review process.

Design 1 Design 4

Welcome page

Schedule page

Hotels page

Customer's testimonial page

Contact page

Tour guide testimonial page

 A. Dedeke / Tourism Management 54 (2016) 541e554 553

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Dr. Adenekan (Nick) Dedeke is working as a Lecturer of
Information Management and Supply Chain at the
D'Amore-McKim School of Business of Northeastern
University, Boston, U.S.A. His research expertise lies in the
areas of information and website quality, application of
the web technologies in tourism, ethics, information
processes, decision-making and analytics.