Travel agencies do better than airlines at online booking - report.

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A study carried out by Keynote Systems (Nasdaq:KEYN) has shown that online travel agencies are outperforming airline websites in terms of customer experience.

The study also found that this affects their booking success.

The company's Keynote Customer Experience (CE) Rankings for the Airline Industry are based on research with 2,000 customers, who evaluated and interacted with 16 major travel and airline websites. The company also collected detailed qualitative and behavioural data as customers performed tasks at each site in addition to the traditional opinion data.

Keynote said that the AirTran, Alaska Air, America West, American Airlines, CheapTickets, Continental, Delta, Expedia, Frontier, JetBlue, Northwest, Orbitz, Southwest, Travelocity, United and US Airways websites were evaluated as part of the study.

The results reportedly showed that there is a significant gap between the online travel agencies and individual airline websites and it was also found that the advantage comes from a strong online customer experience, as there was a direct correlation between customer experience performance and conversion of site visitors into customers.

According to Keynote, the top three agency sites tested got significantly better scores than any airline site, aside from Southwest, in customer satisfaction and customer conversion, with Expedia, Orbitz and Travelocity ranking as the best sites in the Keynote Customer Experience Rankings. The same three sites also topped the Keynote Conversion Impact Index, which measures overall likelihood of a visitor booking on a site or returning to the site in the future.

Among the airlines, the budget airlines Southwest and JetBlue were rated the best in terms of customer experience and conversion. According to the results, Southwest was the only airline site to drive bookings as effectively as the online agency sites. It was found that Southwest did well because of its price satisfaction and because of the industry's best online booking process.

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