Since its establishment in 1984, RyanAir has grown to become Europe’s favorite airline with an impressive 1,800 daily flights from over 80 bases a connecting to more than 200 destinations in 33 countries. The company boats of having over 10,000 highly skilled aviation professionals keen on maintaining high performance and safety record. In 2015 the company year-end-aircraft fleet stood at slightly m 300, with a bulk of fleet being Boeing 737’s. One of the challenges the company and other airlines are facing is enhancing the researching and holiday booking experience online to make it more users friendly.
The booking process is usually fraught by hurdles, many of which can cause you to make serious mistake which cause you holiday or good time because the whole idea of navigating through a high number of options which all look the same is not easy. The other challenge airlines are grappling with is dealing with the high rate of online booking abandonment. Statistics indicate that slightly over 80% of travelers abandon online air travel booking due to a number of reasons including poor user experience, and window shopping. The matter is made even worse by the fact that less than 50% of all booking sites offer less desirable functionality that fall short of what holiday makers look for. This unpleasant experience has a direct impact on the company revenues and level of customer satisfaction with the service. …show more content…
To overcome these ingrained industry challenges, many companies are quickly adopting new technologies in order to keep up with customer demands. This is evident is the growth and uptake of mobile internet browsing, in spite of obvious limitation mobile browsing ahs compared to desktop use. The failure to address the mobile limitations is also causing airline a la fortune, with many mobile shoppers abandoning travel booking altogether. According to Travolution, some £2.7 billion are lost annual by airline companies in the UK due to poor mobile user experience. A glimmer of hope is however evident as many people use tablets to online bookings. The other ray of hope is coming from increase use of UX in the travel industry to respond to growing customer demand. Airlines can conduct UX research through remote usability testing to include customers in the decision making process. Airlines such as Ryanar has transformed its online customer experience using customer central approach to enhance the working and resourcefulness of its digital assets. This has gone a long way to change the people perception regarding its service offerings. Through the airlines Always Getting Better“”program, and unveiling new website, Ryanair now attracts 50 million it’s every month. The website was unveiled in November 2015 and features a host of enhancements many of which are focused on cutting the steps required in booking flights. The accounting section is also enhanced to make it easy for regular passengers to save critical information about their travel details as well as payment data. Remote testing was highly critical in achieving rapid and agile development on the site. Through tools such as UserZoom, unmoderated testing software, both qualitative and quantitative data can be generated. Case in point, task based research can helping point cheapest fare or book dates. The policy of placing users at the forefront of very design decision had helped airlines such as Ryanair to address the