eDigital Research: How do travelers use online and mobile tools to plan their trips?

It’s a two-horse race, with booking.com and hotels.com neck and neck in the race to evaluate travel brands through multi-channel research.

For the study, titled “eDigital Research”, 15 brands in the industry were investigated for their multi-channel (website, mobile site and app) performance, evaluating them in terms of initial travel research, search experience, search results, booking process, design and usability, and customer support.

Hotel product aggregator websites dominated the evaluation results list. In addition to booking.com occupying the top spot, hotels.com, Expedia and ebookers took the second to fourth positions respectively.

Booking.com received the highest scores in a range of assessments, including preliminary information research, search experience, design and usability across all channels, while James Villas ranked first in mobile website and hotels.com performed best in app.

Hotels.com performed well in the initial research, search, search results and booking process of mobile applications, and they ranked at the top with booking.com, expedia, laterrooms and ebookers.

Booking.com and hotels.com received the highest scores in the initial research, search and booking stages of all three channels. In addition, booking.com received praise for its map service integration, pictures and user reviews, and its ability to quickly return relevant results.

Looking at the sites again, Cottages4You, booking.com and Parkdean ranked in the top three after factoring out user support, while Thomson Holidays and Thomas Cook followed closely behind in fourth place.

Despite some of the hype around mobile in the travel industry, this research shows that travel site mobile apps and websites still lag behind their desktop counterparts in terms of user experience.

These situations may also be because these brands have not really done a good job of positioning themselves on the mobile side and have not positioned the content they provide to customers.

The survey was conducted between July and August this year, and cross-compared 33 UK websites, 24 mobile websites, and 15 mobile apps in six aspects of usability indicators.

via: traveldaily