Flight comparison website usability: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Published on 14^th March 2009 in Travel, Usability, Websites, tagged flights, Kayak.

When it comes to buying flights, there are quite a few options available. You could go to a travel agent in your local town, contact one over the phone or go directly to an airline’s website. But increasingly people are turning to price comparison websites which appear to show you all of the available options and let you pick the best.

But which of these sites should you choose to compare flights with? I believe that usability is one of the main factors which influences this decision, especially when it comes to repeat business. I certainly wouldn’t keep shopping at Amazon if I had a bad experience each time.

Although I can’t conduct a thorough study to see if usability makes a difference when buying flights, I can do a walkthrough of each site and pick out the most obvious stumbling blocks that people might face. With this in mind, I did a review of ten popular websites and tried to get a quote for the following trip: London to Seattle; New York to Santiago, Chile; Buenos Aires to London. I chose this not only because I’ll be doing this exact route in the summer, but because it provides a tricky test for the websites under review.

The Good

The following websites exceeded my expectations and made getting a quote particularly easy.

Kayak

Kayak’s autocomplete. Note that Delhi is shown, because it is also known as “New Delhi”, even though ‘new’ isn’t in the name.

Kayak is a relatively new flight comparison website and the only one of the ten that I would consider to have excellent usability. I was a bit taken aback when I first its homepage; clean, white and free of adverts. I imagine it’s like discovering Google when Yahoo is all you know. Getting a quote for my complicated flight was a breeze. With a single click I was on the multi-stop page and I then managed to fill out the form very quickly because of its autocomplete feature. The two-month calendar made it easy to pick dates and the times weren’t too specific. When you click on the next flight, it automatically fills in the departing airport from the one you landed at previously, but highlights that text so that it is easily changed.

Once I had submitted my query, it took me to the results page instantly, where I could see the progress of the search. The results are very clearly laid out and any adjustments you make in the sidebar are instantly applied without having to reload the page. It also includes little warning icons which highlight red-eye flights, turbo-prop planes and short or long stopovers. You can also compare all of the airlines in the search results with a single click.

Opodo

I didn’t expect Opodo‘s usability to be particularly good, but it’s surprisingly well thought out and is the best of the large, general-purpose travel websites. You only need a single click to get to the multi-stop flight search and the link is sensibly placed on the homepage. The form autocompletes airports and like Kayak, its two-month calendar makes picking dates easy. When you submit the form, it sends you immediately to a loading screen which contains the details of the request it’s processing. The flight results page is well laid out and it’s easy to mentally process the flight details.

The Bad

The following websites allowed me to get a quote for my trip (or at least should do), but still have significant room for improvement when it comes to usability.

Expedia

Expedia‘s multi-stop flight search is a little out of the way, with three clicks required to find it, since the default setting on the homepage is ‘Flight + Hotel’. There’s no autocomplete on the search form and no alternative option to lookup an airport or place name. When you submit the form, it takes you straight to a loading page, which gives you adequate feedback. The results page is somewhat messy, but flight details are easy to comprehend and prices are clearly marked. Sorting the results requires a quick reload of the page, but altering other parameters makes it do an entirely new search.

Travelocity

I’m pretty sure this page isn’t meant to look like this!

I found the multi-stop page on Travelocity within two clicks, although the layout appeared to be broken. There’s no autocomplete on the forms, although there is a ‘find city’ link, which pops up and has a roughly the same functionality, although a little clumsier than you’d expect. When I pressed the search button, it started to load, but never gave any feedback at all. After a minute of waiting for the search results to appear, I gave up. I tried it a couple more times to make sure, but it never got to the results page.

The Ugly

None of the following websites allowed me to get a quote for my trip because they don’t appear to sell anything more complicated than a simple return flight, at least online. They might not be ugly in the aesthetic sense, but in terms of usability, they failed at the first hurdle.

STA Travel

STA Travel is actually the travel agent I booked my flight through because as a student, you won’t find cheaper flights elsewhere. However, I had to get a quote over the phone because their website can’t do multi-stop trips. You can do an ‘open-jaw’ flight, which is where you return from a different city, but that’s as complicated as it gets. Perhaps booking through a company whose website I’ve categorised as ‘ugly’ defeats my assertion that usability matters when buying flights, but being a student is a special case and it wouldn’t have made sense to go elsewhere given the prices they offer.

FlyDeals.co.uk

FlyDeals.co.uk doesn’t allow you to search for anything more than a simple return flight, so I couldn’t get a quote online. It also has a couple of interesting usability faux pas that are worth noting. They use the double metaphor of tabs and radio buttons in the same place, and make you uncheck a box to get one-way trips. It would make more sense to simply have a one-way link, because you wouldn’t have to scan and mentally process the return flight option before searching.

Cheap Flights

Cheap Flights seems to be straightforward to use, but it doesn’t do multi-stop trips. However, it is worth noting that the search form autocompletes places and airports, so it could be good for ‘normal’ flights.

Skyscanner

Skyscanner uses a drop-down menu system instead of an input field for airport names. This takes longer to select your flight parameters, but it does illustrate which places can be flow to directly and which require stopovers. It also allows you to search for flights to anywhere in a particular country, which could be useful for some destinations. However, you can’t do multi-stop flights, so I couldn’t get a quote.

Flight Centre

I’ve booked with Flight Centre before, but over the phone. Their website doesn’t actually allow you to search for multi-stop flights and it seems that they prefer it if you just call them.

Fly.com

Fly.com is one of the newest flight websites and looks remarkably similar to Kayak. It has a nice airport autocomplete with country flags, but it doesn’t allow for multi-stop trips.

Recommendations

So what can should flight comparison websites be doing to improve their usability and increase their sales to people like me with complex trips in mind?

Use autocomplete

Flight websites have no excuse not to, since there’s a finite set of airports you can enter. It makes it easier to select places that are difficult to spell and outlines the options for where there are many airports for the same city.

Provide feedback when searching

Searching for flights is a computationally intensive process which takes more time than most things people do on the Web. However, this doesn’t mean that you should just let people wait and hope. The best websites provide immediate feedback and let people know that something’s happening.

Allow multi-stop trips

Six out of the ten websites I tried wouldn’t even allow me to search for a multi-stop trip. If I had been buying flights for real, then I would have immediately left and would be fairly unlikely to return.