Laterooms beats OTAs in latest study
Laterooms.com beats OTAs in latest study
TUI Travel bed bank laterooms.com provides the best overall customer experience, a survey from Nasdaq-listed Keynote Systems has found.
The “2009 Customer Experience Rankings for UK Hotel Reservations” used Keynote Systems WebEffective tool to look at the user experience of seven leading UK bedbanks surveying at least 250 different UK users for each site.
All the sample were 18 or over and use or are interested in using the internet to book travel.
Headline findings reveal that laterooms.com came out top overall, followed by booking.com and hotels.com. The overall findings are based on three indices – customer satisfaction, conversion impact and brand impact.
All seven sites did well in the first category of customer satisfaction, with Keynote looking at areas such as “site organisation, in-context help, options to resolve, frustration and look and feel”. Laterooms came top, with hotels.com beating booking.com into second place in that category.
Conversion impact looks at how likely it is that someone will book, if they will return to the site and if they would recommend the site to a friend.
Brand impact looks at what impression of a brand a visitor gets from a web site. In both these fields, the order was laterooms, booking.com, hotels.com.
Keynote also had a look at reliability and responsiveness. Opodo received the top ranking for reliability.
“Opodo was the only site of the seven monitored to have no errors on any page during the peak period hours of the study period,” Keynote said.
The responsiveness section shows a “a surprisingly wide variation in basic performance”.
Download times varied from 1.3 seconds to 7.3 seconds, while some search results took up to 32.6 seconds to appear. Laterooms.com came out top in the responsiveness category too.
Lastminute.com, Expedia and ebookers were the other websites looked at in the study.
