Online Hotel Booking Systems: Are You Happy With Them?
More of us are booking accommodation online. No surprise there for anyone, I’m sure. No surprise either that most people expect online booking to increase. But how satisfied are you with online booking?
A company called iPerceptions has started a new quarterly study that will measure how satisfied we are with such booking sites and the very first report covering the first three months of the year has been published. It is a pretty comprehensive study since it covers 137,000 visitors to over 100 hospitality sites. (these can be individual hotels, chains or booking sites for all sorts of hotels/villas etc).
To get technical for a moment, the study measures satisfaction on a scale of 1-10. what they have seemed to have found is that the more complicated and lengthy a site is to go through and book then the least satisfied we are. Probably no surprise there either.
But the fact that people are frustrated by the process means designers of these booking sites have got to make it easier. Some don’t let you book near a place where you want to be (such as a university for your child’s graduation or a church for a wedding and you end up looking at a map to find out how many miles you’re away) Some don’t allow you to go back to check something but instead through you out so you have to start again.
If nothing else, this study shows IT people (hopefully not like Channel 4′s “The IT Crowd”) need to be told that not everyone has years of experience with playing on the web.
Remember KISS; keep it simple stupid.
Entries (RSS 2.0)
