In the latest Keynote study of air travel websites, Southwest.com took first place for Overall Customer Experience, while US Airways scored highest for Responsiveness (Speed) and JetBlue took first for Reliability.
The study is part of the work performed by Keynote Competitive Research. The rankings are based on responses from real users, who were observed as they accomplished tasks on each of the sites studied, as well as real data collected through Keynote website monitoring to assess the technical quality of the sites. For each study, Keynote recognizes the companies with the overall top ranking, as well as those exhibiting excellence in specific categories.
For the 'Customer Experience' portion of the study, Keynote conducted online user testing sessions with 2,000 prospective customers (200 per site) from across the United States as each interacted with the website of one of 10 air travel booking websites: American, Delta, Expedia, JetBlue, Orbitz, Priceline (NEW), Southwest, Travelocity, United and US Airways.
For the Customer Experience portion of the 2013 US Air Travel Study, panelists were asked to spend a few minutes on the site's home page, forming an impression of the site and what it has to offer. Panelists were then asked to complete a variety of flight search and booking tasks, including searching for a particular flight from the site's homepage, as well as from an outside search engine. Finally, panelists were asked to proceed through the process of booking the flight they found during the previous task, going as far as possible without actually completing the purchase.
The study revealed that when tested by actual consumers Southwest's website (www.southwest.com) offered the strongest overall Customer Experience, finishing first in the Brand Impact and Customer Satisfaction categories.
Other key findings include:
- Ease of Booking remains the most important aspect of the customer experience, predicting brand perceptions and conversion
- Price Satisfaction, Site Organization, Flight Search Option Satisfaction, Flight Availability, Visual Appeal, and Perceived Performance are the key drivers for brand and conversion
- Five sites now provide the best Overall Customer Experience in 2013: Southwest, Travelocity, Priceline, Orbitz, and Expedia
- Southwest, Orbitz, and Expedia continue to be top performers. Travelocity improves significantly this year and is now a top site across all 4 indices. Priceline enters the rankings in 2013, also a top performer across all Keynote indices.
"Our quantitative analysis revealed that when actual users visited the air travel sites, ease of booking continues to be the most important predictor of a positive customer experience, but price satisfaction, site organization and strong search functionality were all also very important to our panel of testers," said Ben Rushlo, senior director of performance management at Keynote. "In the Technical Quality portion of the study, JetBlue scored very well for both Reliability and Responsiveness, but overall, while improving slightly from last year's study, almost all of the sites had slower load times than recommended for optimal performance levels."
In addition to evaluating customer experience with its panel of actual users, the Keynote study also examined two broad aspects of technical quality: responsiveness and reliability. Responsiveness comprises: high speed response, DSL (midband) response, response time consistency, geographic uniformity and load handling, while reliability is comprised of availability and outages.
For the 'Technical Quality' portion of the study, using measurement computers located in 12 locations across the US, Keynote measured a typical transaction of starting at the Home Page and going through the process of searching for and booking a flight, stopping where payment information was requested. Based on the thousands of transactions monitored over the course of the study, US Airways' website scored highest in site Responsiveness (or speed), while JetBlue's website scored the highest for Reliability with a perfect score of 1000.
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