Report: Too Many Airline E-Commerce Sites Stuck on the Tarmac
Written by Fred J. AunApril 29th, 2009
Fortunately for Lufthansa and JetBlue, the skills needed to keep airplanes up is very different from keeping E-Commerce sites up. Those airlines were among the 62 percent of major airline E-Commerce sites that had significantly "unreliable" uptime performances. Airline E-Commerce sites in general enjoyed "considerably worse" reliability than most other E-Commerce sites even though their availability is crucial for customers trying to get urgent ticketing, flight status and other real-time information, according to Pingdom, which monitors site uptime.
Despite those issues, many airline sites place a much lower priority on strong uptimes because airline customers are generally much less likely to change carriers based on slow site performance. An unhappy customer visiting Barnes & Noble's site will jump to Borders.com or Amazon.com with the least provocation, but an unhappy Continental customer is much less likely to go through the extreme hassle of switching airlines.
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-Ed
May 1st, 2009 at 5:35 pm
Hmmm, so it didn’t count CRS problems with actually making a booking, just HTTP error 404 or similar. So those of us who fly United and AA and had MAJOR booking issues this last year don’t get into the mix.
The worst that was counted; Lufthansa and JetBlue, I’ve yet to out of 10 bookings on each find a flaw or problem using their sites. In fact, the Lufthansa site I find to be one of the easiest to deal with for a non-US airline.
I find some of the Asian sites the worst as their e-commerce sites are nothing more than a “part online” “part offline” approach. They take all the info, check availability and check your payment – BUT don’t issue a ticket. That is done my someone manually, and upto 12 hours later. So much for true e-commerce