Travel websites fare poorly for customer service

By Alun Williams

Posted on 13 Jun 2006 at 11:09

Travel websites don't take us where we want to go, according to a new survey of online services. The travel sector was found to the worst offender when it came to failing to deliver on user requests.

When it came to queries over flight destinations, refunds and visa information, holiday and airline websites could average only one answer out of ten, with 40 per cent unable to answer a single question online.

Things got worse when customers had to send an email to gain information. According to the findings, it took an average of 66 hours to get a response, with one site taking 149 hours to respond. Compared with one year ago, travel companies are taking 24 hours longer to reply to email.

'Holidaymakers looking for information online are facing long delays even before they set foot in the airport,' said Davin Yap, CEO, of Transversal, the Cambridge-based developer of e-business services that is behind the survey. 'We were amazed to find that despite highlighting these issues last year, little has improved and in many cases travel websites have gotten worse. These results show that the travel industry's move online is at the expense of customer service.'

The research worked by searching for answers to sector-specific questions, whether by websites or via email, and covered the ten leading brands in each sector. For travel, these included the likes of BA, Virgin, British Midlands, EasyJet, Ryan Air, FlyBe, Thomson My Travel, etc.

The detailed travel results included the following (with comparative 2005 figures in brackets): the average number of questions answered online were 1.35 out of 10 (1.2); the percentage of companies that responded to email correctly was 40 per cent (2 per cent); the average email response time was 66 hours (42 hours); and the percentage with customer search was 50 per cent (30 per cent).

Despite promoting themselves as the natural destination for booking holidays, online travel sites don't seem to have invested in improving their interfaces, said Transversal. A spokesperson told us: 'There's room for a lot improvement, or they will keep pushing users to other channels for information'.

The annual research spanned other sectors including retail, banking, insurance, consumer electronics, utility and telecoms sectors. The second and third worst sectors were insurance and then (jointly tied) banking and telecoms.

The best sector was 'general retail' (such as CDs, books, etc), which is perhaps unsurprising, but even here only 5 out of 10 user questions were answered.