Customer Complaints Drive Change

Customer Complaints Drive Change

Customer criticism as a result of confusion has led House of Travel to amend their booking website to now display all flights inclusive of taxes and surcharges.

eCommerce director Hilary Lewis confirmed the move to inclusive pricing was driven of the back of a large number of emails from customers that they found it difficult to establish which airline was the cheapest.

"If I'm honest to achieve something like this has involved a significant amount of IT development because of the way in which airlines provide us with their flight information. Just about every airline does something different so we have had to build a specific piece of technology to ensure the information was combined and it is then presented for comparison to the consumer."

Lewis agreed that from a consumer perspective it had been incredibly ambiguous and regardless of how airlines provided the information to a travel agent that was irrelevant to the consumers' dilemma.

"We would have much preferred to have achieved all inclusive pricing on our website months ago but the IT requirements were demanding."

In the past 12 months there has been much publicity about the Commerce Commissions advertising requirements which state all flights to be shown inclusive of any taxes and surcharges.

The House of Travel booking website was launched in 2004 with world first technology that scraped all airlines websites flying within and from New Zealand where often the cheapest flights can be found. In addition to this they also provided customers with flights from the traditional travel agency system claiming they are the only travel website in New Zealand providing all of the airline options.

Lewis says in a new move the flights are shown at the same price as the airline and a one off per person booking fee ($2.50 domestic, $9 short-haul, $20 long-haul) is charged providing transparency to the consumer of the pricing.

"Our technology saves customers time, plus they have the added advantage of booking a different airline in each direction so they can maximise cheap one way airfares and save money."

House of Travel's online business has seen an increase of 154% in sales in the past 12 months with around 80% of their customers being new to the chain.

"As word spreads of our site, the fact it lists all the airline options in an unbiased way and you allocate yourself to an outlet in case you need assistance, the traffic and conversion rates have escalated.

Lewis says 20% of its annual transactions were currently done via houseoftravel.co.nz and predicted this would grow to 50% within five years.

The House of Travel Group has forecasted turnover in of $750m for 2007, it has 90 retail outlets (with specialist corporate, adventure and leisure and group travel outlets) throughout New Zealand, its own award winning aggregated booking website www.houseoftravel.co.nz and two wholesale companies (both inbound and outbound). It employs in excess of 1,100 people and is privately owned (by New Zealander Chris Paulsen) and operated since it was established in 1987.

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