93 seconds and 12 clicks to book a flight: UNGUESS announces the Flight Aggregator Challenge

For its new study, UNGUESS, the crowdsourcing platform that, through its engaged community of real users, enables companies to make better decisions faster, compared eight of the leading online flight comparison and booking sites (Booking.com, eDreams, Expedia, Kayak, lastminute.com, Skyscanner, Tripadvisor and Volagratis) to discover which one was perceived as the best one.

MILAN, Aug. 22, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Holiday planning is moving more and more online: according to ISTAT data, 66.5% of bookings were made online in 2021 (58.4% in 2019)[1].  UNGUESS asked its community to try eight flight comparison sites [2] (Booking.com, eDreams, Expedia, Kayak, lastminute.com, Skyscanner, Tripadvisor, and Volagratis) to identify the most popular one among users and the features that make it the best.

Users and parameters taken into account in the test phase

UNGUESS involved Italian users from its worldwide community who had already booked flights online and asked them to test on a scale of 1 to 7: how easy it is to book a flight online on a particular site (expectation versus reality), how many clicks it takes, how user-friendly the site is, and whether they would recommend the service.

Expectations: a task that is easy to complete and tends to be quick

The task's real completion time varied from a minimum of 70.6 seconds to a maximum of 144.27 seconds with 60% of participants believing it would have taken between two and five minutes.

"This gap may show that the quality of the interaction determines the 'perceived' speed." comments Laura Morabito, UX Designer & Researcher at UNGUESS.

The expected ease of completion was rated 5.88 out of 7, but, after completing the task, the actual ease of booking was rated higher, at 6.13 with eDreams, Booking.com and Tripadvisor rated the "most user-friendly" sites.

In terms of the number of clicks taken to complete the task Volagratis ranked first with just 10.5 clicks, followed by lastminute.com and eDreams.

"The number of clicks gives a sense of the platform's user-friendliness, but users then choose a comparison site on the basis of other parameters." explains the UX Designer & Researcher.

Satisfaction, information quality, attractiveness and promoter score: a (almost) unanimous top three

The satisfaction, information quality, attractiveness and net promoter score (i.e. "likelihood to recommend" to a friend) metrics received positive ratings with eDreams, Booking.com and Tripadvisor as the top players.

"A product that is perceived as more satisfying also has better information quality, is attractive and would be recommended to friends," explains Alessandro Caliandro, Product & Design Lead at UNGUESS.

Three factors that determine success

This study individuated three factors that determine the success of a flight comparison site: 

1. Parameters: how are prices, timetables and baggage information presented?
2. Loyalty programmes and non-seat ancillaries: do these affect information clarity?
3. Number of interferences: how many steps, pages and pop-ups are shown to the user before allowing them to complete the process?

[1] https://www.istat.it/it/files//2022/04/Viaggi_vacanze_2021.pdf

[2] Twenty-five people with an average age of 35 (15 men and 10 women) participated in this new UNGUESS test, 19 of whom performed the test via desktop and the remaining 6 via mobile.

[3] The number of clicks is expressed as an average of the results of the various test participants. This is why, in some cases, clicks have decimal places.

The profile of UNGUESS 

UNGUESS is the technological platform that brings the collective knowledge of its community (Tryber) into the decision-making processes of companies quickly and whenever necessary. Born in 2015, under the name of AppQuality, in the "Mobile Lab" research centre of the Polytechnic University of Milan in Cremona by the three former students, Edoardo Vannutelli, Filippo Maria Renga and Luca Manara, now CEO of the startup, today the transition to UNGUESS reinforces the mission to support companies in eliminating guesswork from any decision-making process, putting the end consumers at the centre of the product strategy. The startup regularly collaborates with medium to large-sized international companies, including Pirelli, Costa Crociere, De'Longhi Group, ING, Enel, Lottomatica, Intesa Sanpaolo, Axa and many others. Partners include: Fintech District, Digital Innovation Observatories, Nexi Open.

Media Contacts: Elisa Pagni, elisa.pagni@unguess.io, +39 3311373431