BA continues to hold 1st place in terms of online usability for users according to our latest online travel report, Flights Online: Ensuring Your Site Takes Off.
Just as well as 2010 could be said to be its Annus horribilis to date.
First the snow, then volcanic ash followed by a number of strikes, at least BA are making it easy for the user to purchase flights online if not following through with the service by actually having it’s airlines fly.
In a competitive market which is more and more feeling the influence of uncontrollable outside effects, making it easy for someone to find and purchase travel has never been so important. Now, when users are sitting at home booking a flight or holiday many other considerations are going to come into play, so keeping a potential customer is crucial.
So why do the average scores in our annual travel report still leave plenty of room for improvement? Although the average usability score has increased from 56.7% to 64.4% since last year, basic guidelines that still need improvement include the following:
- Supporting comparison shoppers
- Making pages ‘share-friendly’
- Providing airport information
- Displaying clear progress bars
- Providing contact numbers during the booking process
So perhaps for those companies with lower scores this is their time to capitalise at BA’s expense and improve their user experience.
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Alex James commented on 5 July 2010 at 2:03 pm
What does ’share-friendly’ give the BA web site? Please explain.
Thanks,
Alex
Claire Savage commented on 7 July 2010 at 9:30 pm
Thanks for your comment Alex. This was one of the areas in which the websites didn’t score too highly and there’s still room for improvement in the travel industry. Planning flights and holidays is often done with the involvement of other people (e.g. partners, friends or colleagues) so the ability to share information is very important.
The overall average was 2.3 out of 5, with travel agents scoring 2.1 on average and carriers 2.5. BA did very well overall in the report but only scored 2 for this.
To score highly for Making pages “share friendly” websites had to make available options to print flight details and give other sharing mechanisms (e.g. a ‘Send to a friend’ form). Furthermore, they had to let customers use these options before purchasing the flights and without having to first login to the website. Flybmi.com was the only website to score 5 out of 5 for this.
If you’re interested in finding out more about this please feel free to download the full report which contains a table showing how each website scored for each criteria.