Online travel sector needs to invest in online customer engagement: study
Published: 18 Nov 2009
A study has indicated that the online travel sector needs to invest more in online customer engagement if it is to encourage people to return and re-book.
According to the latest eTravel Benchmark Study by eDigitalResearch, with 94 percent of people researching their holidays online, the travel sites that win loyalty will differentiate themselves on best practice customer service.
The survey explored the end to end website experience from first impressions to the booking process across 29 leading travel websites including cruise lines, cross-channel ferries, package holidays and airlines. Overall, package holiday travel sites led the way with Thomson Holidays achieving a consistently high performance with a further four package holiday sites in the top ten including lastminute.com.
Customer service was the lowest performing survey section with email customer service particularly poor with only a quarter of people happy with how their query was handled. Customer service is a clear industry weak point which has meant that the industry’s average net promoter score, which ranks sites on their likelihood to be recommended by consumers, lags behind other sectors including retail and finance that have been benchmarked recently by eDigitalResearch.
Derek Eccleston, head of research at eDigitalResearch, the travel sector still has some way to go to compete with ‘best of breed’ companies for website engagement and customer service.
“Consumers want a site that is simple to purchase from, but at the same time has the inspirational ‘wow’ factor that keeps them engaged. After all, reputations are built on the end to end customer experience, not just having the best site,” said Eccleston.
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