Tealeaf(R) has reported a surge of
customer wins in the travel industry, indicating a growing strategic
emphasis on improving customer experiences within the expanding digital
travel market. More than twenty travel providers and portals—such as
Airlines Reporting Corporation (ARC), Aloha Airlines, Bourne Leisure,
Continental Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines, Holidaybreak, hotels.com,
Starwood, VEGAS.com and TUI UK—are among the companies leveraging
Tealeaf’s Customer Experience Management solutions to proactively
identify, understand and eliminate online obstacles and ensure
successful customer experiences.

According to an August 2007 report, “Humanizing the Digital Travel
Experience,” by Forrester Research, an independent research firm, 2007
online leisure travel sales in the US and Europe are expected to reach
$142.2 billion and grow to $213.8 billion by 2010. Despite this success,
the report finds that travel companies “digitally disappoint” travelers
by not meeting their expectations, resulting in a series of “noticeable
performance gaps,” with the ultimate result that “travelers’
satisfaction with most digital channels is, for the most part, tangibly
inferior to using offline channels.”

“Tealeaf provides us with unparalleled insight into each customer’s
online experience,” said John Keast, COO, VEGAS.com. “We are able to
immediately gain visibility into any online issues, improve the overall
usability and conversion of our websites and make business decisions
influenced directly by the customer point of view.”

Consumers are rapidly adopting online travel. In fact, “travelers who
use the Internet—for any purpose—are the norm,” with 90 percent of
American business travelers regularly going online and 83 percent of US
leisure travelers going online at least once a month according to the
Forrester report. Beyond that, “two-thirds or more of all travelers in
North America view technology as something that helps make their lives
easier—a benefit that extends to travel planning and purchase.” Yet,
digital travel experiences still often fall short of meeting online
consumers’ expectations, with the report stating that more than 199
million travelers are frustrated getting travel information online, for
reasons including poor website navigation and lack of essential
functionality.

“With the online travel market growing at such a rapid pace, this is a
very positive time for the market but it is more important than ever
that companies recognize obstacles to their customers’ online success
still exist, and are potentially very detrimental to their top line,”
said Rebecca Ward, chairman & CEO, Tealeaf. “Our travel customers are
not simply resting on general market momentum, they are truly committed
to proactively delivering the best possible online user experience. We
are proud to be a part of their business strategy by providing
actionable insight into the dynamic online interactions of each user on
their sites.”

Tealeaf was recently recognized as “an industry pioneer” and named “the
unchallenged leader in customer behavior analysis” by Forrester in “The
Forrester Wave: Appliance-Based End-User Experience Monitoring,” Q2 2007
(June 2007). With Tealeaf, businesses are empowered to see how their
website works through the eyes of the customer, instead of relying on
the insufficiency of disparate data points in effort to interpret their
experiences.
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