British Airways has again scored highest in travel website usability according to research from user experience specialist Webcredible.
Budget airlines made the biggest gains year-on-year in the 2010 Flights Online Report. EasyJet scored 77%, up 27 percentage points on last year, while Ryanair jumped from a ranking of 20 to eight with an overall score of 66%.
The 2010 Flights Online Report looked at 10 airline and 10 travel agent websites to benchmark them against best practise usability guidelines. BA.com attained an overall rating of 78%.
The research also shows that the total average usability score has risen to 64.4% compared to an average of 55.2% last year. Five websites scoring 70% or above demonstrated increased attention to user experience.
However, 11 websites did not manage to reach 70% and four websites fell between 40 and 50%, with areas such as making pages ‘shareable’, providing airport information and listing contact numbers cited as key areas for improvement.
The study tested a range of website functions including flight search, search results, flight summary booking pages and error handling.