SAN MATEO, Calif., — June 20, 2005 — New competitive intelligence from Keynote Systems (Nasdaq: KEYN), The Internet Performance Authority®, crowns Expedia and Royal Caribbean as the Internet’s best sites for booking a cruise online – and examines the reasons for success and failure in the online cruise industry. The Keynote Customer Experience Rankings for the Cruise Industry is based on research with 2,000 consumers as they interacted with leading cruise Web sites.
For the study, Keynote evaluated the following online travel agencies and cruise Web sites: Carnival, Celebrity, Cheap Tickets, Expedia, Holland America, Norwegian, Orbitz, Princess, Royal Caribbean, and Travelocity.
“Expedia and Royal Caribbean continue to set the customer experience standard for the online cruise industry,” said Dr. Bonny Brown, director of research and public services for Keynote. “Expedia has shown consistent leadership across all travel verticals from airline bookings and hotel reservations, on through to cruise bookings – and Royal Caribbean has solidified its position as the only cruise line to compete successfully with the online travel agencies that dominate the cruise industry online.”
For a second year in a row, the Keynote competitive intelligence study found that online travel agencies outperform the online cruise sites across the board in terms of customer experience, with online agencies capturing three of the top four positions in the Keynote CE Rankings.
| Keynote Customer Experience RankingsOnline Cruise Industry |
|
|---|---|
| 1 | Expedia |
| 2 | Royal Caribbean |
| 3 | Travelocity |
Keynote found that Expedia, as well as Travelocity and Orbitz, excelled in providing a superior online customer experience thanks in large part to their strong cruise research functions and their provision of accompanying flight & lodging research functions.
“The ability to offer consumers comparative price and cruise information and a one-stop-shop for accompanying air and lodging options has been a consistent advantage for the online travel agencies,” said Dr. Brown. “According to our analysis, the ability to research cruise prices and options was one of the leading drivers of site success in converting site browsers into buyers.”
According to Keynote research and analysis, the online cruise booking process is the most important component of the consumer’s online experience, followed closely by cruise activity research and cruise price and options research. The ability to research and view accompanying flight and hotel options was also a leading driver of a positive online customer experience.
Royal Caribbean was the top ranked cruise line site, and the second ranked site in the overall Keynote Customer Experience Rankings, due in large part to its strong performance in providing cruise activity research online. In addition, Royal Caribbean was deemed to have one of the most consumer-friendly online booking processes, second only to Travelocity, the leader in that category.
“Royal Caribbean leverages its natural cruise line advantages in providing consumers with extensive, detailed and easy to research cruise activities information,” said Dr. Brown. “And their online booking process is competitive with and comparable to the efficient, consumer-friendly booking processes of the online travel agencies. Other cruise lines could learn a lot from the success of Royal Caribbean.”
The Keynote study, which competitively benchmarks online travel and cruise sites in a number of key business outcomes and performance measures, noted that one of the biggest advances over the past year was an improvement in Travelocity’s online booking process.
Travelocity improved the imaging and information available to consumers and added a hotel and airfare option as part of its cruise booking process. Site upgrades included a detailed cruise ship map that allows consumers to pick specific rooms, and a running summary of the cruise options and prices. These changes helped propel Travelocity to the leadership position in the Keynote rankings of the cruise booking process, which was the leading component of the online customer experience. The report also noted that Celebrity showed strong improvement in a number of key categories, specifically in the customer support category and in the design and organization of its site.
“When sites invest to eliminate frustrations and fulfill customers’ needs, customers respond. Travelocity’s improved cruise booking process is a clear case in point,” said Dr. Brown.
The Keynote Customer Experience Rankings for Cruise Web Sites provides in-depth competitive analysis of the online cruise industry and contain hundreds of additional data points and a detailed analysis of the study’s findings. For more information about the full report or to purchase this report, visit: http://www.keynote.com/sbl_forms/cem_cruise_web_sites.html
About Keynote Customer Experience Research
Keynote is the leading provider of customer experience research services, offering both competitive intelligence and custom research examining consumer attitudes and behavior on the Web. Keynote’s research provides critical business insight into online customer experiences, industry trends and competitive Web strategies for a variety of vertical industries. In addition to traditional opinion data, Keynote’s proprietary research technology and access to a pool of 160,000+ panelists allows for the collection of detailed qualitative and behavioral data that inform its reports.
Keynote CE (CE) Rankings are available for a number of industries including the retail, banking, brokerage and credit card industries, as well as several travel verticals, including the airline, hotel, rental car and cruise industries.
To learn more about Keynote’s competitive intelligence offerings and for a list of the various vertical industry reports that are available, visit: http://www.keynote.com/solutions/competitive_intelligence.html
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 16,000 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 60 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 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. © 2005 Keynote Systems, Inc.
Editorial Contacts:
Dan Berkowitz, Keynote, (650) 403-3305, dberkowitz@keynote.com
Dan Cahill, Roaring Communications, (415) 552-3999, dcahill@roaringcommunications.com
Chenoa Taitt, Lippert Heilshorn & Associates, (212) 838-3777, ctaitt@lhai.com