SAN MATEO, Calif., — September 30, 2004 — Expedia and Royal Caribbean are the clear early leaders in the burgeoning competition for customers researching and booking a cruise online according to a new customer experience study. The study released by Keynote Systems, the worldwide leader in e-business performance management services, is based on research with 2,000 consumers as they interacted with the 10 leading online travel and cruise Web sites and is the first syndicated research study released by Keynote since the company acquired Vividence, the leader in Web-based customer research.
Unlike traditional market research firms, the Vividence methodology acquired by Keynote combines technology, research and consulting to provide new ways of understanding online customers, competitors and markets. The study results announced today are a continuation of Vividence’s highly regarded syndicated research program that evaluates online customer experience across industries, which continues under the Keynote brand name. Keynote will employ the same proprietary research techniques and methodologies used and perfected by Vividence over the years in all its customer experience rankings.
Keynote Customer Experience Rankings (formerly Vividence Customer Experience Rankings) |
|
|---|---|
Highest-Scoring Sites |
|
| 1 | Expedia |
| 2 | Royal Caribbean |
Lowest-Scoring Sites |
|
| 9 | Princess |
| 10 | Norwegian |
The Keynote Customer Experience (CE) Rankings (formerly Vividence Customer Experience Rankings) for cruise Web sites provides a competitive benchmark for the leading travel and cruise Web sites based on more than 250 metrics measured and evaluated for each site during the study. The sites topping the rankings performed best, in aggregate, across all measured metrics, including customer satisfaction, brand and purchase impact.
Online Travel Agencies Sail Past Cruise
Sites
The online travel agencies outperform the online
cruise sites across the board in terms of customer experience
according to the study, with online agencies capturing four of the
top five positions in the Keynote rankings (formerly Vividence
Customer Experience Rankings). Royal Caribbean was the only cruise
supplier to break into the top five, finishing second in the overall
rankings.
“Expedia and the other online travel agencies provide a significantly better online experience for the customer than do the cruise Web sites themselves, with the exception of Royal Caribbean which is clearly ahead of the other supplier sites,” said Dr. Bonny Brown, director of research and public services for Keynote. “The online travel agencies gain their advantage by performing significantly better in terms of ease of use and the ability to search and compare cruise and travel options.”
Cruise Lines Face Structural
Disadvantages
Because of the pricing and complexity of
booking cruises, cruise sites have significant hurdles to overcome
in pleasing consumers. A cruise vacation very often requires
multiple travel services and consumers demand options for these
services, yet most of the cruise supplier sites provide little or no
flexibility with air and hotel arrangements. The study found this to
be the consumer’s top frustration with booking a cruise online.
The second biggest frustration for consumers is price transparency. Cruise pricing is often complicated and cruises are a relatively large expense for the average consumer. Thus, consumers expect prices to be clearly stated and explained; yet the majority of cruise sites do a poor job of doing so. Consumers were particularly dissatisfied with the Princess and Norwegian cruise line Web sites due to the lack of travel options and poor pricing transparency.
One in four consumers participating in the study found it difficult to compare cruises or determine the total price of a cruise online.
Poor Online Experience Hurts Cruise Brands,
Sales
“The structural disadvantages that cruise lines
face are no excuse for poor performance,” said Brown. “Other
industries and companies, such as Dell in the computer hardware
market, have been able to succeed providing guidance to online
consumers despite complex purchasing processes and a high price
point.”
Although online bookings for cruises remain a relatively small percentage of the total online travel and cruise businesses, the study found direct consequences for sites with a poor online experience, including a strong correlation between customer experience and overall brand perceptions and eventual purchase, whether online or offline.
“The online experience has a significant effect on consumer perceptions and purchasing habits,” said Brown. “And the cruise lines that do not focus on the online experience risk losing out to direct competitors and to the online travel agencies. They are not charting their own course.”
The top two ranked sites in terms of customer experience were also the sites with the best conversion rates in converting browsers into buyers, as measured by the Conversion Index. The bottom ranked sites, Princess and Norwegian, performed the worst in converting browsers into buyers and in terms of brand perception after the online experience.
Royal Caribbean Makes Waves
Royal Caribbean
was the only cruise line to overcome these hurdles and performed
exceedingly well across the board with consumers. The Royal
Caribbean site is the first supplier site to rank competitively with
the online travel agencies, something no other airline, hotel or
cruise site has accomplished across all customer experience research
in the travel industry as performed by Vividence in the past.
“Royal Caribbean performed exceedingly well in large measure because the company leveraged its knowledge of the cruise experience,” said Brown. “Their Web site provides visuals and a level of interactivity that gives consumers an actual taste of what the cruise experience would be like on Royal Caribbean.”
That experience starts right away on the home page. Seventy percent of participants in the study said the Royal Caribbean home page makes them want to explore the site further. Royal Caribbean scored almost as well as top-rated Expedia in the Brand Impact Index, a measure of brand perception following site experience. In general, the cruise lines outperformed the online agencies in terms of the visual appeal of their sites.
The Carnival, Celebrity, Cheap Tickets, Expedia, Holland America, Norwegian, Orbitz, Princess, Royal Caribbean and Travelocity Web sites were evaluated for this study.
Other Keynote syndicated research (formerly known as Vividence syndicated research) in the travel sector includes examinations of the online experience for lodging, vacation packages, business travelers, rental cars, and airlines. Other sectors include banking, credit card, online dating, search, retail, and computer hardware.
Keynote Customer Experience Rankings
The
Keynote Customer Experience (CE) Rankings are competitive
benchmarking studies of customer behavior across leading Web sites
in specific vertical industries. The studies provide critical
business insight into online customer experiences, industry trends
and competitive Web strategies. Keynote uses proprietary software
and a panel of thousands of real consumers to gather the
quantitative, qualitative and behavioral data that inform the
reports.
For each study, Keynote monitors approximately 1,500+ consumers as they perform tasks at leading Web sites. More than 150 metrics are captured, measured and evaluated for each site reviewed. These metrics are then used to compose indexes and benchmarks in a number of categories including customer satisfaction, brand impact and customer loyalty. The Web sites topping the Keynote CE Rankings performed best, in aggregate, across all measured indices and metrics.
The Keynote CE Rankings are the successor to the Vividence CE Rankings following Keynote’s acquisition of Vividence in September 2004.
About Keynote
Founded in 1995, Keynote
Systems (Nasdaq “KEYN”), The Internet Performance Authority®, is the
worldwide leader in e-business performance management services. Over
2,100 corporate IT departments and 19,000 individual subscribers
rely on Keynote’s growing range of measurement and monitoring,
service level and customer experience management services to improve
e-business performance by reducing costs, improving customer
satisfaction and increasing profitability.
Keynote is viewed as The Internet Performance Authority due to the company’s global infrastructure of over 1,600 measurement computers in more than 50 cities worldwide that capture and store on a daily basis over 40 million Internet performance measurements, frequent media citations quoting Keynote's Web performance data and analysis, the company’s market-leading Web performance indices for vertical markets and leading customer research that provides critical business insight into online customer experiences, industry trends, and competitive Web strategies.
Keynote Systems, Inc. is headquartered in San Mateo, California and can be reached at http://www.keynote.com/ or by phone in the U.S. at 650-403-2400.
Keynote, The Internet Performance Authority and Perspective are registered trademarks of Keynote Systems, Inc. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Public Relations Contacts:
Dan Berkowitz,
Keynote Systems, Inc., (650) 403-3305, dberkowitz@keynote.com
Dan
Cahill, Roaring PR (for Keynote), (415) 552-3999, dcahill@roaringcommunications.com