Official websites are important communication tools for tourist destinations. However, it is difficult to make a systematic and complete evaluation of their quality due to their diversity of functionalities, which makes them complex to analyse. This paper proposes the complementation of the WQI assessment system for Destination Marketing Organizations with the Multi-criteria Decision Aiding (MCDA) method ELECTRE. WQI assessment system contains several indicators (123) that can be organised in a hierarchical structure, which makes suitable the application of ELECTRE-III-H. ELECTRE-III-H method is able to reveal relevant preference relations among the websites with regard to different aspects (e.g., usability, architecture or persuasiveness), being a powerful tool to detect the strong and weak points of each website. The study is illustrated with the results of a pilot test that evaluates 10 touristic destination websites.

Luis Del Vasto-Terrientes is supported by a FI predoctoral grant from Generalitat de Catalunya. This work was partially supported by the Spain's Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through projects CSO2012-34824 “Uso e influencia de los social media y la comunicación 2.0 en la toma de decisiones turísticas y en la imagen de marca de los destinos” and CSO 2011-22691 “Online Communication for Destination Brands. Development of an Integrated Assessment Tool: Websites Mobile Applications and Social Media (CODETUR)”. This work was also partially supported by the Spanish research project SHADE (TIN-2012-34369: Semantic and Hierarchical Attributes in Decision Making).