Piaras Kelly PR - Public Relations in Ireland

One of the points I made during my presentation at Tourism Ireland’s eSymposium last year was that it always shocks me when people do not respond to emails. In the era of supposed instant communication, if you email a tourism company to enquire about one of their package you would at least expect a response that day. Ye time and time again, I have enquired about a package only hear back the next day or later still. At that stage of course I have either made a purchase or gotten a response from a different vendor.

Denise Cox, who was at my presentation, very kindly forwarded my on eService provider Transversal’s findings of their latest annual multi-channel customer service analysis of 100 leading websites. The survey found that:

Travel websites have provided the worst online customer service for the past two years. 2007 has seen significant improvement in travel websites’ ability to respond to holidaymakers’ basic questions, but the majority - 60 per cent - still remain unanswered.

For customers with no other option but to send an email for information, it took an average of 58 hours to get a response and only 40 per cent of companies were able to respond with the correct information. Travel companies wanting to promote last minute deals look set to be held back by the lack of basic information on their websites and by poor response times to customer enquiries.

What I really find laughable is numerous tourist organisations and vendors are investing in web 2.0 in a bid to engage audiences. How do they hope to connect with potential tourists when they can’t even get the communication basics right?