Seems like a two horse race when it comes to the results of a multichannel study assessing travel brands for their performance with booking.com and hotels.com consistently scoring well.
For the purpose of the eDigitalResearch study, 15 brands are looked at for their multichannel performance (website, mobile site, apps) and assessed for initial research, search, search results, booking process, design and usability and customer support.
While booking.com emerges top of the rankings, hotel aggregators dominate overall with Hotels.com, Expedia coming and ebookers taking the next three slots.
Booking.com scores the highest in a number of categories including initial research, search and design and usability across all its channels while James Villas comes top for mobile website and hotels.com emerges as having the best mobile app.
Hotels.com scores well across research, search, results and booking process phases for its mobile app and again, it is online accommodation suppliers which dominate with booking.com, Expedia, laterooms and ebookers taking the next four slots.
Both booking.com and hotels.com also rate highest for the initial research, search and booking phases across all three channels with booking.com praised for its integration of maps, images and reviews as well as its ability to return relevant results quickly.
Just looking at websites, Cottages4You, booking.com and Parkdean take the top three slots although when you strip out the customer support element, Thomson Holidays and Thomas Cook come second jointly.
Despite all hype around mobile and the potential for travel, the study shows apps and mobile websites are lagging behind their desktop counterparts when it comes to customer experience.
This could be a factor of brands not yet having quite worked out who they are targeting with their mobile presence and what content to include.
The study was carried out July to August this year and compares the usability of 33 UK websites, 24 mobile sites and 15 apps across six the categories.