The survey rated the performance of nine airline e-commerce portals based on 400 customer-ranked criteria. It compared Australasia's top five carriers, based on industry criteria, with South-East Asian giants Singapore Airlines and Cathay Pacific. The survey also included two European "value-based" airlines, Ryan Air and EasyJet.
The study indicated that Hong Kong-based Cathay Pacific and Singapore Airlines have a better understanding of the needs of online consumers than the top five Australasian-based aviators do. The pair, scoring 79 per cent and 78 per cent respectively, has an eight percentage-point led over the next highest scoring competitor operating in the local region, Air New Zealand.
Qantas trails just behind the New Zealand-based carrier on 69 per cent closely followed by the former manifestation of Ansett Airlines. Newcomer, Virgin Blue, took second last place in the field on 61 per cent.
The survey has been released at a time when the number of Australian consumers making their travel arrangements online is beginning to grow dramatically.
"We're seeing increases every month of 50 to 60 percent," said Kenneth Chin, e-commerce manager at Harvey World Travel, in an earlier report on ZDNet Australia.
Dr. Adir Shiffman, GlobalReviews founder, said that while Qantas and Ansett achieved near-perfect scores in phone and email-service, poor site usability and lack of online customer information, especially in the area of privacy, hold Australasian airline portals back.
"Privacy is a big issue," said Shiffman. "If I'm a nervous online customer divulging personal details, I want to know what's happening with that information."
Local air services are also failing to capitalise on the informational advantages associated with Internet services according to Shiffman. His comments suggest that online services could replace the role of call centre staff taking enquiries from customers seeking detailed service information such as those about in-flight movies and meals.
"If you want to circumvent circumstances that a customer will call for information you have the opportunity to do that online," he said.
If regional aviation portals can address these needs they can "strengthen [their] brand relationship and take the opportunity to take [their] service over and above what is available," said Shiffman.
Qantas is happy with the results of the survey.
"The online performance of Australian airlines, particularly Qantas, has improved since the last survey conducted in July," said a spokesperson for the company's e-commerce division.
However, the company accepted the survey's finding that the portal needs to be improved.
"The major issue identified with Qantas was usability and we have a number of initiatives in progress to improve this," said the spokesperson without providing details.
GlobalReviews will repeat the survey early in 2002, applying it to UK-based airlines.
I'd say Virgin Blue's Website is more user-friendly than QANTAS's. Ansett's site was pretty bad expecting a lot of clicking to get a basic ticket quote. They need to look from the consumer viewpoint more rather than getting the public to work the way their airline does - usual bureacratic bungling.