An effectiveness evaluation model for the web-based marketing of the airline industry

In the air transportation industry the web-based marketing has already been widely applied to service the frequent customers as well as to attract new customers. For it, normally the airlines must invest amount of enterprise resources to develop the information technology (IT) platforms and maintain the operations mechanism so that the effectiveness issue should be well considered. In this paper an integrated model for evaluating airlines’ websites effectiveness is proposed. This model is based on the perspectives of “marketing mix 4Ps” and “website quality”, in which the Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) method is used to analyze the relationship among criteria, and then the Analytic Network Process (ANP) is applied to compute the weight of each criterion, finally the modified VlseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR) method is used to rank the performance. The proposed model is applied to analyze the websites of five air transportation companies in Taiwan. Its result show that the Taiwanese airlines do not fully capitalize on the Web’s marketing potential, and the weight-variance analysis suggests several managerial actions for achieving an ideal web-based marketing.