Travel websites worst for online customer service

"Buyers or just browsing?"

"We have found it impossible to reply to every enquiry we receive. Depending on which product people enquire on we have found wildly different conversion rates. People sending in enquiries to our www.soweto.co.za website are almost always genuine travelers. Then the enquiries we get to our Inhaca.co.za website which deals with Island Holidays has a very low conversion rate. We end up going through those enquiries looking for the "most likely to travel". A lot of the emails coming in for those special getaway holidays, we think, are from the "sitting in the office at 3 o'clock wishing they were somewhere else" crowd. When we are done with what we believe are the genuine enquiries, we start getting back to those. Undoubtedly we do lose some genuine enquiries but getting back to everyone, every day was wasting a lot of our time."

"Dealing with spam"

"Spam used to be a big problem for us too, but we have now integrated our feedback form with a database, so all feedback emails are being saved into a database instead. This also allows us to assign various emails to different members of staff. As for service questions vs customers, we found it's 50:50, but we have a whole department dedicated to cross-selling to those asking service questions. Our primary industry is low-cost flights, but to questions such as "cost of a taxi from the airport", we suggest a partner airport transfer company."

"Doing well....."

"If only 60% of Tarvel web-sites failed to respond, then in my expereience they are doing well! My recent enquiries via their web-sites, to a dozen UK hotels regarding rates/availability for a mid-week short-break elicited just two responses. On this basis Travel sites are doing very well!"

Published: 7.12.2007