British Airways has maintained its position as the easiest to use airline website in the UK but low cost carriers have dramatically improved in the past 12 months.
The annual survey by user experience agency Webcredible sees the troubled airline stay at the number one spot with Virgin Atlantic giving away second place this year to EasyJet.
Ryanair has also jumped to eighth position in 2010 after languishing in bottom place in 2009.
Overall the airline sector has improved usability over the past year, according to the study, with the top 20 websites seeing an average score of 64%, up from 55% in 2009.
Webcredible says:
“Despite these overall improvements, 11 websites scored percentages  in the 60’s and four websites scored between 40-50 per cent, demonstrating that many companies are still not doing enough to maximise their share of the potential revenue in this highly contested marketplace.
“The report highlighted that key guidelines that still need improving include supporting comparison shoppers, making pages ‘share friendly’, providing airport information, displaying clear progress bars and providing contact numbers during the booking process.”
The study also included a number of online travel agency websites, such as Opodo, Lastminute.com and Netflights.com.
Each website was evaluated against 20 best practice guidelines and assigned a score of 0-5 for each guideline, with 5 being the maximum. Â With 20 guidelines in total, websites were assigned a total Web Usability Index rating out of 100.
The overall ranking for each website:
- British Airways – 78% (2009 71%)
- EasyJet – 77% (50%)
- Virgin Atlantic – 75% (70%)
- TravelRepublic – 73% (-)
- BMI – 70% (65%)
- Expedia – 68% (70%)
- Travelocity – 68% (70%)
- Ryanair – 66% (41%)
- Ebookers – 65% (56%)
- Opodo – 64% (62%)
- Travelbag – 63% (54%)
- FlyBe – 63% (53%)
- Monarch – 63% (47%)
- NetFlights – 62% (56%)
- Lastminute.com – 62% (59%)
- Jet2.com – 60% (49%)
- STA Travel – 56% (58%)
- First Choice – 56% (50%
- ThomsonFly – 52% (51%)
- Thomas Cook – 47% (47%)
NB: The full report can be downloaded from the Webcredible website.
This is baffling to me. As a heavy and long time user of 5 of the sites – BA, Easyjet and Ryanair from the airline side and Expedia and Travelocity… plus a moderate user of many other sites (one that deserves some mention which is not included on this site is Booking.com) this ranking is beyond belief. Clearly the people who did the study never spend any time buying travel online.
BA’s site is a mass of broken links and circular arguments. And it gets worse not better – although 2007 was its absolute low point.
I had not seen this study before.
Also clearly since several engines power several of these sites there is a clear problem in ranking…
There is one category which doesn’t seem to have been on the reviewers sites. Meaningful results…
The number of times that the sites throw up rubbish and failed results is significant. (I keep a library of them). BA’s are the most fun. Their cache is persistent. So much so I some times have to wait 24 hours until it refreshes.
I think that the testing needs to be more focused on the whole user experience not just on the user interface
Cheers
Thanks for your comments Timothy, I understand your thoughts on the results. Just to clarify the focus of the report, in this case the focus is on key user journeys, such as searching for a flight and going through the checkout process, which cover the parts of the sites that are most frequently used.
We don’t try to check the whole sites for broken links, etc, because we want to focus on giving an overview of the key user journeys based on usability best practice guidelines (as stated in the methodology).
You are indeed correct that some of the websites may share a back-end booking engine. But, sites sharing an engine can have very different designs and, therefore, user experiences. Hence, they might still be included in our research.
Ryanair would show more profitability if someone fires CEO O’Leary for his comments when he said airlines should fire co-pilots and only have a pilot on each plane. Is this guy for real?