Hotwire.com Ranks Highest in Customer Satisfaction
Market Share Among Independent Travel Web Sites Remains Flat
WESTLAKE VILLAGE, CA, November 25, 2008. While the percentage of travelers making online airline, rental car and hotel reservations has increased 15 percentage points during the past year, bookings for independent travel Web sites have increased by only 1 percentage point since 2007, according to the J.D. Power and Associates 2008 Independent Travel Web Site Satisfaction Study(SM).
Now in its fourth year, the study measures customer satisfaction with online booking for airline, hotel or rental car reservations made on seven major independent travel Web sites. Six factors are examined to measure customer satisfaction. In order of importance, they are: competitiveness of price; ease of booking; usefulness of the information on the Web site; availability of booking options/travel packages; appearance/design of Web site; and ease of navigation.
The study finds that while 70 percent of travel reservations were booked online in 2008 -- up from 53 percent in 2007 -- only 16 percent were made through independent travel Web sites. This marks a negligible market share increase of 1 percent in 2008. Additionally, consumers who booked their travel using an independent Web site were considerably less satisfied compared with 2007, with satisfaction scores declining by 17 points on a 1,000-point scale to 785 in 2008.
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