iPerceptions survey data from Q2 2009 is available for download at the iPerceptions Resource Center.

Report highlights:

• Hospitality websites struggle to convert visitors into bookings
  
• Only 60% of users actually completed a transaction during the course of their visit
• 4 in 10 visitors walked away without making a reservation
  
• over 40% of users abandoned the booking process because of a usability problem with the booking engine or because of a technical/navigation issue in another section of the website

Hotel and travel websites are too focused on traffic and not paying enough attention to what people are actually doing when visiting their website.

With Pay Per Click costs exceeding € 1,00 for competitive keywords (at least the ones I am dealing with from time to time) I would expect greater attention and consensus to invest in Web Analytics but this isn't always the case - at least in my experience.

• What's your experience ?
• What are hotels doing to improve the user's experience and make booking a hotel easy and fast ?
• Are hotels concentrated on making websites they themselves like very much but are too difficult to use ?

Share your point of view !