More than half of online travel websites are slow to respond to customer inquiries, a research firm found in a new study.
In addition, nearly 3 in 10 firms shared customer’s personal data with other companies without permission, according to the Customer Respect Group (CRG).
Their survey analyzed more than 40 travel sites.
They found that 24% of airlines, hotels and resellers of their services never answered customer inquiries. Another 33% answered a day later. Responses that take longer than a day are considered late, said the CRG.
On customer privacy, 28% of the sites shared customer’s personal data without permission, said the Boston-based CRG, which publishes online customer-respect ratings on a variety of industries
“Industries, in general, still have a problem in the sharing of personal data,” said Terry Golesworthy, president of the CRG. “Airlines, however, are particularly not good at it.”
The CRG weighs a number of attributes related to customer service in coming up with an overall rating from 1 to 10 for an industry. Ten is the highest.
The travel industry, overall, rated 6.8, which was higher than the average Customer Respect Index of 5.9 for all the industries analyzed by the CRG.
“The online resellers are much better at this,” Mr Golesworthy said. “This is their business, so they obviously try to focus on making their websites as good as they can be, in order to make a profit.”
Report by David Wilkening
