And The Best AirlineTravel Sites Are?
We’re suspicious when research shows this or that airline, web site or hotel was voted the best, because we know people and statistics don’t tell the truth.
On the other hand, when results jibe with what we know and have researched on our own, we believe.
Then there’s the all-important method the researchers use to get their results.
Keynote Competitive Research, which bills itself as “the internet’s performance authority,” conducted online interviews with 2,000 air travelers... as they actually used, interacted, with 10 air travel web sites.
The group is part of Keynote Systems which in turn says it’s “the global leader in Internet and cloud monitoring.”
Keynote Competitive divided the 2,000 participants in 10 groups of 200 customers, and each group interacted with the 10 sites: American Airlines, Continental Airlines, Delta Airlines, Expedia, JetBlue, Orbitz, Southwest Airlines, Travelocity, United Airlines and US Airways.
They watched the interactions of each customer as he or she searched for a flight, began the booking process and utilized the site’s customer support features.
The results:
• Southwest Airlines and Travelocity were the winners, as measured by customer satisfaction and conversions i.e. turning “lookers into bookers”.
• Orbitz was thought to be “helpful” and “reliable” more than any other site in the study.
• Travelocity ranked in the top tier of sites for 4 out of 7 qualities: price satisfaction, design and organization.
• Southwest ranked in the top tier of all sites, and was determined to perform significantly better than all others in ease of booking.
Keynote concluded that “price satisfaction is now the most important aspect of the overall customer experience, predicting brand perception and conversion.”
We questioned this because in our minds, ease of use and a site’s ability to flex with a customers options and needs mattered more.
Chris Musto, Keynote’s manager of financial services and research agreed saying that while price satisfaction is the leading predictor, it’s not the majority predictor. He said it only slightly outpaces Design & Organization in predicting outcomes. “If we sum up Design and Organization and Ease of Booking,” he said, “together they predict more of brand impact and conversion than does price satisfaction alone.”
How about other non-legacy sites like Kayak or Hippmunk?.
Musto noted while he respects the innovation both sites bring to the table, both sites send customers to other sites to complete the booking process...although Kayak has taken a giant step by allowing hotel bookings directly from their site.
Would I take these results as absolute? Not for a moment. But until the next survey, they’ll do.
Comments
Forrest: Qatar Airways route planners are interesting group :) I found Qatar flying three flights to BKK for a Saturday: QR 610, 612, 614 have plenty of seats in all economy classes in all the three flights. Yet, they are not the cheapest if one chooses to have a stopover. Since they are the only non-stop in that route, they will not be the cheapest.
National flag carriers tend to fly to destinations, or plan frequencies with might not be economically optimal.
Forrest,
Qatar Airways does offer web-only specials on it's website. Click here to see the offers from Doha.
The current Doha to Bangkok special fare starts at QAR 1,990 or approximately US$546.
I doubt if Expedia or other online travel/ticketing agencies (OTA) offers Qatar's web fares to the public.
You might want to sign up with Qatar's newsletter so they can regularly apprise you of their special fares.
Forrest: I will try (it's too late in the night :) )
For each flight, an airline's revenue protection guys (called yield management) allocate number of seats way in advance to various price buckets. Same seat different price. These buckets are called farebasis. Each farebasis has differing restrictions and rules. The cheapest seats have a lot of restrictions. So if the cheapest seat in a flight from A to B 330 days in advance is assigned say a letter T, and they put 12 seats in that category, and say an upgradeable but discounted and non-refundable one is assigned M with 9 seats with a higher price.
As time goes by, seats fill up, if the humans do not intervene to add more seats to T class, then the computer reservation system will show higher fares. People will have to contend with higher fare seat. If not enough movement takes place in the middle category, a human might add more seats to T class.
What the meta search engines do, is contract with either individual airlines via an agreement, or through GDS system to query via a special connection the fares that are published and present them in a pretty web interface.
Ever wonder why you find a fare which is cheap, and then you go to book it, and it is no longer available ? Is it a scam ? A bait and a switch ? Mostly no ! That last seat in T class just got sold, and now you have to contend with next higher fare.
Now Free upgrades.. that's a whole different kettle of fish :-)
I hope it clarifies what I wrote previously.
Well, you know, I bet not a lot us are intimately familiar with the Byzantine, arcane functions of "airline reservation and fare (yield) management systems.."
Glad you do, Tony and Anil. It keeps the rest us from stumbling too badly :)
cheers
Thanks
An intelligent search requires a basic understanding of fare bases [plural] and associated rules, seasonality, seat availability, flight schedules, and booking class code hierarchies of airlines.
Instead of educating the public about how it really works, the airline ticket distribution industry is more intent on creating a spiffier online vending machine.
If consumers know that they have hit the rock bottom published fare for a particular airline, or they have not because a seat is not available on the required booking class code on the day or time they wish to travel; then they can make decisions more intelligently. Sometimes I wonder if many bloggers in the web really understand how an airline reservation and fare (yield) management system works, for if they did then there will be more Anils out there. Thank you Anil.
I think what was of interest was less the geometry of booking relative to price and more the dynamics of human-web site interactions
Thanks for the insights, though!
A good percentage of occasional traveler is bound to spend a lot more time and lot more effort trying to squeeze few pennies of a fare. Frequent Fliers for better or worse will stick to their chosen carrier, or alliance (check the popular forum flyertalk.com)
All airlines do have various buckets of seats priced with different restrictions. Knowing when to buy and at what pricepoint is a game. Unfortunately you cannot game the system, A forpay website expertflyer.com will tell you how many seats in which category are available for a particular flight. So, if there are no L,U,T farebasis on Delta flight, then you know that higher fares are going to be charged in H,Q etc onto Y,B,M in Coach/Economy.
If T9 on a flight 3 days away then you know that you'll get a good fare on DL for that flight. Where as T0,U0,L0 means higher fare.
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