First Choice case study

First Choice, one of the UK's leading tour operator, protects customers and revenues with 24-hour web site monitoring from Site Confidence

For today’s tour operators, an online presence is a key, and sometimes the only, channel of revenue for its business. In 2004 alone the IMRG have predicted that consumer spending online will be worth a total estimated £17 billion and the Internet travel industry is said to be one of the largest categories within this mass market. Yet few online tour operators pay enough attention to the performance and availability of their websites. A recent report suggested that this was particularly serious in the UK, with all of the five worst travel sites reviewed belonging to UK companies*. Each time a customer has a negative experience with a website it undermines their confidence in the Internet transaction, the tour operator and most crucially the quality of the holiday itself - often a family’s largest single annual expenditure.

As a leading UK online tour operator, whose daily online bookings of holidays have increased by 100% over 2003, First Choice realised in early 2001 that it was crucial for it to incorporate the quality of its online booking experience into its customer service measurement criteria - like any other company it could not afford to lose revenue from a malfunctioning site. In order to achieve this it approached a number of website performance companies to discover how its online presence could be monitored, and quickly discovered a multitude of ways in which this could be done. Its preference was for a UK-based, user-friendly service which can be tailored to its exact specifications. It also wanted to be able to see how its site measured up against competitors in the same industry, and the only company that could provide all of this on a ‘24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week’ basis was Site Confidence.

Site Confidence provides an end-to-end service reporting tool which monitors a website from a user’s perspective, allowing customers to take control of the data on their website and to gain an overall analysis of their site. A specific transaction - clicking on a link, for instance - can be monitored at high frequency levels (e.g. once every 5 minutes) to ensure requests for data are being processed as smoothly as possible every hour of the day. If a problem does appear on the website Site Confidence will alert a specified IT professional by SMS message or by mobile phone so actions can be taken immediately to remedy the problem.

First Choice has been a customer of Site Confidence for over two years and throughout that time the website has changed and evolved to cater for different sectors of the travel market. The service that Site Confidence provides is particularly well suited to the assessment of these changes and alterations, as well as providing valuable proof of return on investment for key upgrades to the site’s hosting or IT infrastructure.

Graham Riddall, Distribution Systems Manager at First Choice, said: "A fully functioning website is absolutely key to maximising both revenue generation and the customer experience, and I find it hard to comprehend that any online travel retailer could be ignorant of the performance of its website. Working with Site Confidence has given us a hands-on approach to our website maintenance: it would be impossible for us to monitor our site with as much dedication and to as much detail in-house, and we would never be able to diagnose a problem so quickly. Problems arise and we solve them immediately, minimising downtime for our site. But it is when we need to make adjustments that Site Confidence really helps us out - I can tell immediately how it will affect the customer trying to buy a holiday."

*Source Shelley Taylor & Associates, January 2004