I recently did some research about UK travel companies' online serivce for a guest blog on Travel Rants. I found the Transversal customer service study of top websites in the travel, banking, insurance, consumer goods and telecoms sectors, which can be downloaded if you register at Transversal.

I was amazed to read that 60% of emails to travel company websites did not receive a reply. Of the remaining 40% companies who did manage to respond, the average response time was 42 hours. The travel websites were asked ten pretty basic question e.g. can I fly from this airport to that airport, do I need a visa for that country, what is the duty free allowance? 80% of travel websites could only manage to answer 2 out of the 10 queries.
You wonder how they get away with it, given that Britons are the biggest online shoppers in Europe and the credit card company VISA recored a 159% annual increase in online spending in travel and tourism.

My belief is that it is because so much of travel is sold on price. If many customers do make travel buying decisions based mainly on price then companies may decide that providing good customer service is too expensive and doesn’t increase sales enough to justify the cost of providing good customer service. The low cost airline Ryanair immediately springs to mind as an example of this business rationale. However Ryanair does have a pretty good website, I have always been able to find the answer to my queries on their site.

I think if companies have a well designed, content rich website with a frequently asked question section and a search facility where you can type in questions and relevant answers come up then they can provide pretty good customer service without needing to employ many staff to answer emails or phone queries.

tags: hospitality, travel, online, sites, UK, united-kingdom, travel-companies, queries, customer-service