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Travel Web Sites Fail to Deliver, Even the Good Ones
By CHRISTINA BINKLEY
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Online travel sites are rotten! That's the conclusion of a study of 46 international hotel, airline, travel-agency and car-rental sites that's set to be released Thursday.
Among the sites' failings: They're hard to navigate and aren't tailored to important customers such as business travelers and affluent, over-60 consumers, says the report by Shelley Taylor & Associates, a market-research and consulting firm with offices in London and Palo Alto, Calif.
In contrast to nontravel online marketers such as Amazon, the report says most sites also fail to offer the higher level of personal service that consumers can get offline.
"All online travel sites are guilty of failing to deliver satisfying travel experiences," says Shelley Taylor, the firm's principal. "Travel sites should offer the same level of service and support as their land-based equivalents."
Expedia.com won the top rating, followed by Travelocity.com, Hilton.com and Orbitz.com. Northwest Airlines (www.nwa.com) got the vote for best home page for its easy navigation tabs and relatively simple design. The company looked at sites in the U.S., the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Italy, France, Canada and Norway.
The report singles out Expedia for providing strong presales assistance, including a site tour that illustrates how to make a purchase. Such Web-site tours, the report says, have been widely discontinued based on the mistaken assumption that travelers are more online-savvy these days and don't need them.
But the report is critical even of its top-rated sites. "There is no compelling reason," Ms. Taylor says, that Travelocity should have different sites depending on where a traveler is located -- leaving an American who books a trip to the United Kingdom to figure out another Web site upon arrival in the U.K. Representatives for Travelocity, owned by Sabre Holdings Corp., of Southlake, Texas, say customers can always reach their home-country sites by typing in their address -- Travelocity.com or Travelocity.co.uk, for instance. They say it's "crucial" to have locally based sites because the "vast majority of travelers who use them will have local tastes, interests and needs."
Ms. Taylor says the high rate at which consumers abandon travel Web sites in midpurchase can be blamed in large part on the difficulty in getting answers to questions. Other problems identified in the report: Only 13 of the 46 sites offer language choices on their home pages and many fail to reach out to international travelers -- a big omission on a medium designed to cut across geographic borders. British Airways (www.britishairways.com), the study says, required that a traveler's billing address match the country in which their flight will originate. A British Airways spokesman says he believes the requirement is a measure to discourage credit-card fraud.
The study, conducted this past October through December, isn't fully representative -- it didn't evaluate some big U.S. sites such as UAL Corp.'s United Airlines (www.united.com) or Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc., for instance. "We tried to pick the sites from which we'd learn the most," Ms. Taylor says.
Ms. Taylor calls the report an "indictment" of the online-travel industry. Ultimately, she predicts, there will be a shakeout among travel Web sites much like the dot-com crashes of a few years ago, when many unsophisticated online marketers fell by the wayside.
Executives at Hilton Hotels Corp., based in Beverly Hills, Calif., are aware that a high number of potential online consumers abandon their purchases in midtransaction. Last year, Hilton rebuilt its site to make it faster and added a reservations feature called "Push to talk," in which consumers can talk to an agent via their computer (if they have a microphone and speakers) or request a return phone call. "It was in response to customer complaints," Hilton spokeswoman Kathy Shepard says.
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