Measuring the effectiveness of US official state tourism websites.

This study attempts to apply the ICTRT (information, communication, transaction, relationship and technical merit) model to assess the effectiveness of US official state tourism websites through content analysis by expert evaluators. The results demonstrated that US State Tourism Offices (STOs) were not able to effectively adopt and manage information technology to support more sophisticated business operations. Most STOs focused mainly on basic website functions, such as information and communication. Applications supporting more advanced functions, such as transaction and relationship building were not being widely deployed. In addition, an inverse, curvilinear relationship was found between website complexity and website performance. Suggestions and implications were provided and discussed based on the research findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]