Travel and Hospitality Website Benchmarking Report

Travel and Hospitality Website Benchmarking Report

A. Report Purpose

The purpose of this report is to gain a better understanding of what comprises a well thought out travel and hospitality website. This benchmarking report will analyze four popular travel and hospitality websites based on certain evaluative attributes. These attributes will then be ranked in a manner explained further in the methodologies section (B1). Through analysis of the four websites chosen and our respective findings, various design insights (C6) will come to the forefront as more useful or less useful than others. The term usefulness will be elaborated on in section C1. This research will allow us, in building a travel and hospitality website, to employ the most useful designs and realize what attributes on which to focus. In the executive summary section we will offer advice (B3), having surveyed the leading sites as to what could be improved upon or developed further to enhance the overall experience at each particular website.

Executive Summary

B1. Methodology

The following section titled methodolosy will describe our approach to the benchmarking report including our testing criteria. The task presented to us was to benchmark travel related web sites. There were several possibilities in terms of which sites to use. Our group chose to benchmark the four most visited travel web sites: Travelocity.com, Expedia.com, Lowestfare.com, and Cheaptickets.com (source: Consumer Reports). Consumers have visited these four web sites the most, therefore they must have provided value for their consumer. We felt it would be beneficial for our group to benchmark them, in order to gain insight on how our web site will ultimately look, and what ...

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...avelocity, a customer feedback interface in which previous customers can post their experiences and dealings with us for potential new customers to review. We will provide as much information and pricing content as is feasible given our constraints. In addition we will use graphics that load quickly so even customers with slow internet access can view our site without delay. In order to build a repeat business with customers we will be providing a member login iterface that will record to our shared database the specifics about our customers and their travel habits and any rewards points, similar to frequent flyer miles, that they may have earned.

This benchmark report has greatly helped our understanding of the different features and aspects of a quality travel and hospitality website. This knowledge gathered will now be applied to our own site development.