BA tops travel website usability study

Published: 29 Apr 2009

The websites of some of the UK’s budget airlines are some of the worst to use, according to Webcredible’s online travel usability report.

The study, which evaluated the websites of 20 airlines and travel agents in the UK, found that Ryanair is at the bottom (with 41 points out of 100).

British Airways topped the table with 71 percent, closely followed by Expedia and Virgin Atlantic on 70 percent.

With only three websites scoring over 70, and with so many top Internet brands scoring between 50 and 60 points, there’s clearly significant scope for these market leaders to improve the usability of their online offering, stated the company.

Though the average usability score has increased from 51.5 percent to 56.7 percent since last year, key guidelines that still need improvement include displaying clear progress bars, clear identification of errors and providing information on airports.

The main differences observed between travel agents and carriers were:

There’s a significant disparity across some criteria between travel agents and carriers such as showing prices early on, easy refinement of searches and displaying a contact telephone number.

Carrier sites are still generally less transparent when it comes to total pricing, choosing to add additional costs later during users’ booking journey, despite customer backlash about this practice.

Due to the smaller volume of flights available, carrier sites have less need to offer more sophisticated features for manipulating search results by sorting and filtering.

Travel agents are typically more transparent with call centre contact details during the searching and booking process (this could be due to differences in the types of commercial businesses and their approach to customer service).

Read more: Website, Usability

Comments

Kilgore said on 6 May 09:

It's interesting that RyanAir scores at the bottom of the list. My hunch is that this is at least partly based on the negative public persona of Michael O'Leary.

I have booked a dozen or more flights with RyanAir online. I find the site to be straight forward without many distractions. Just show me the options of time and price, then sell me a ticket.

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