While airline often use beautiful destination imagery and the excitement of travel in their marketing efforts, it’s worth noting that the industry can be sharply practical.
Beyond the consideration phase of the customer journey, travellers frequently want to select from *any* available airline that goes to their destination, at the acceptable balance of price and quality that matters to them.
In this way, the decision-making – and booking – process can be astonishingly quick compared the the weeks that travellers may invest in thinking about where they want to go on their trips.
This booking phase is even more rapid when travellers are on the move for business reasons and family visits where timescales and practicality can trump brand considerations.
One of the biggest barriers that airlines – and booking engines – can present to travellers in this context is a slow or clunky booking experience.
Not only does this risk abandonment of the sale, but it may leave a lasting negative impression.
Ahead of World Travel Market, we’ve looked at a few dozen of the largest booking sites, and ranked according to page speed –
It’s clear that these highly transactional sites have a lot going on in the background with security aspects and marketing integrations firing up with every visit, but it’s notable just how wide a spread of page speeds there are.
Our goal with this post isn’t to highlight ‘winners and losers’ – but to take a snapshot in time to show how sites that are all performing broadly similar tasks can differ in the user experience offered –again at a particular moment in time.
With implications for user experience, brand reputation and (indirectly) SEO, page speed is clearly a priority focus for many airline brands– but some will continually be struggling with platform limitations and other business considerations.
Discussing all aspects of travel SEO, content, tech SEO and more at World Travel Market is Luke Kenna – get in touch to book a meeting!
*All stats are from BatchSpeed.com
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