Limelight Networks’ senior director Steve Miller Jones examines why it’s vital that travel brands deliver a flawless online experience in today’s speed-driven Internet environment.
Making an online booking is often where most customers start their travel experience today. Amid stiff competition, brands need to cut through the clutter, ensuring that their target audience not only lands on their page, but completes the booking.
Ensuring reliability
Consumers want a fast and consistent experience each time they interact with brands online.
According to Limelight Network’s State of User Experience survey, 84 per cent of respondents expect web performance consistency across devices; 43 per cent said they would abandon the current booking site in favour of a competitor’s if the experience is slow.
Brands should look to integrate content delivery network (CDN) solutions, which can ensure this amid changing network conditions. Users will gain fast content access without rebuffering, and ultimately have a positive experience.
Ensuring security
Beyond providing an interactive user experience, brands need to ensure that their site is secure. With 98 per cent of organisations experiencing cyberattacks since 2016, brands need to be adequately equipped, as cyberattacks ultimately undermine customer trust and relationships.
This can be safeguarded by automatically stopping bad bots and facilitating good bots through a trusted CDN, to maintain revenue-generating traffic. This will ensure the speed of customer experience, through ongoing monitoring that protects web applications without impacting performance.
Benefiting from an optimised user experience
When users enjoy a beneficial web experience, brands ultimately gain profitability and customer trust.
In the case of Cebu Pacific, an airline which receives 90 per cent of its user bookings online, they wanted to not only ensure web acceleration but security of revenue and routes by managing partner bots. By implementing a CDN, it saw a 61 per cent improvement in global delivery performance, successfully scaling with customer requirements.
As such, an optimised user experience is more crucial than ever. Brands should start by taking the first step, by identifying technology partners that can edge them closer to this goal.
Limelight Networks is a global CDN service provider that enables organisations to deliver faster websites, more responsive applications, highest-quality videos, and consistent game and software downloads to any device.
