Virgin Atlantic has overtaken arch rival British Airways in an in-depth annual study looking at user experience of leading UK travel websites.
The Webcredible 2011 Flights Online Report examines 20 air product retailers (airlines and online travel agencies) and ranks them based on 20 criteria around UEX and design.
Virgin just lost out in the 2010 study, coming in third place behind EasyJet and eventual winner BA.
Securing the top spot this year, Webcredible says of the Virgin site:
"Virgin Atlantic has made clear improvements scoring highly across best practice usability guidelines including error handling methods, providing the ability to share pages with friends, and offering clear search functions."
The study also looked at mobile versions of websites. Webcredible says the pair "have started to create more useful mobile offerings with both carrier airlines judged favourably in their efforts to engage customers across channels".
The total average across the 20 websites increased on the previous year, rising from 64.4% in 2010 to 65.7 in 2011.
"With only nine websites scoring between 60-69 points and 5 websites scoring between 50 and 59 points, most UK travel sites are still failing to do enough to maximise their share of the potential revenue in this highly competitive marketplace by addressing key usability issues."
The study found there was no significant disparity between online travel agencies and airline websites, although it remarks that did "lag behind in terms of showing prices early on during the booking journey as well as offering easy refinement of searches, displaying a contact telephone number, and showing a clear progress bar during the flight booking process".
Airline websites were singled out for providing information around cancellations and refunds being prominent enough for users to find.
Here is the full table:
[table id=2063 /]