A recent study by Keynote Systems reports that customers are increasingly dissatisfied with their online travel/hotel booking experience. For a category that’s one of the largest in e-commerce, online travel also has one of the lowest reliability ratings – reliability is defined as site availability with little or no downtime.
The findings are an eye-opener for an industry that’s usually ahead of the technology curve – review sites, blogs, portals, meta-search engines & direct supplier websites are a few of the options available for Internet travel booking.
Site reliability represents a return to the basics of online customer satisfaction.
I totally agree of what you mentioned, I am also working in the e-commerce dept for one of the hotel group. For us, Website is another “Piece” that present yourself to the public. If you cant make your site reliable, how could you possibly achieve customer satsification
I have a question on a different aspect of online travel. On Expedia’s last call with investors, Dara talked about how ground-breaking Expedia’s recent contract with Marriott is. Apparently the contract pays more to Expedia to book distressed inventory, or inventory as part of a package. Do you think that this represents a meaningful change in the relationship between the hotel industry and the OTAs?
Thistle, I doubt it represents any paradigm shift. Expedia is basically getting the online version of what used to be done with “wholesalers” and “FIT”s in years gone by. The ultimate – if unstated – aim of all hotel companies parallels that of the airlines – wresting most if not all control from them OTAs