TOPIC: TOURISM WEBSITE AUDIT REPORT (FLIGHT CENTRE)
Contents
7 C’s of customer interface. 6
Introduction
The Flight Centre Travel Group Limited is the travel group within and across Australia. The company has expanded its group with vast leisure and travel sales network into four regions. The four areas covered in the travel group are Australia and New Zealand, The Americas, EMEA and Asia. The travel solution is provided to more than 75 countries with the help of independent local operators. Remarkable ongoing growth has been enjoyed by the company currently. The company was established in the year 1980 by its founder Graham Skroo Turner (Flight Centre 2019). There are more than 30 brands that the company provides to travellers that include the flagship flight centre and Liberty. The corporate brands include FCM and Traveller. FLT is listed in ASE Australian Securities Exchange in the year 1995. A total transaction that the company generates is $AU 23 billion with a delivered value of $AU 343 million during the fiscal year 2019, which is profit before tax. The website audit is considered in the report while presenting facts and information with detail analysis of marketing activities and 7 C’s of customer interface. The company markets its services with the help of social media marketing and digital marketing as the core aspect of growth and development and customer attraction.
Website analysis
The official website of Flight Centre is https://www.flightcentre.com.au/ with various options such as flights, hotels, packages, tours, cruise, tours and deals. These are the essential features that attract traveller to book tickets and make reservations (Flight Centre 2019). Travel destinations include local and international holidays that are reflected in the website. The access towards searching a particular hotel or flight is provided in the website that indicates the feasibility of service to the traveller/customer. The company attracts travellers and offer several services that indicate the involvement of booking, reserving or buying travel tickets. There are several inner pages that the website suggests such as travel deals to know, Sydney to London flights, Auckland flights, New York holidays, Bali holidays, etc (Flight Centre 2019). Blogs are mentioned on the website that attracts customers to read and gain knowledge about mastering family holidays, planning holidays, flight centre’s, scenic journeys and try a new tack. These indicate a constant growth and lead to fulfilling the expectation of traveller. Therefore showing a significant increase in the business, the website is attractive with pages that are mentioned below.
The benefits of the website are many therefore visitors of the site who need travel service will be attracted to services such as offers on flights, visit of nearby places, visit Bali, New York and hot destinations that attract and are of interest for travellers. The reviews of the website are 4.8 out of 5, which is admirable and connects to traveller satisfaction. The price of the flight is reasonable, that is mentioned on the website to which the schedule is different. Calculating the cost, time and travel place, the site provides faster results. Security is what is considered in the price with insurance and other fees added in the final price of flight booking tickets (Karnowski 2017). International visitors can change the language on the website so that secure service in terms of style is accessible to the site successfully. The content of the website mostly represent the significant points that attract the traveller along with booking the tickets; hotels can be booked consequently while gaining offers and discounts on the final price. However, price is the key element that attracts the traveller to choose from the best of all (Kwok & Yu 2016). Price strategy is widely considered here with promotional measures and activities that attract the customers in no time.
The option provided other than hotels, flights and cruises are extras. Extras include travel insurance, car hire; rail passes, gift cards, travel money card, loyalty programs and typical wealth awards. These extra services engage travellers to check the additional services that help in boarding and reviewing in a hotel. Travel extra includes holiday inspiration and provides information on car hire, which is the most demanding service. Once a traveller reaches to a particular destination, search for taxi or rail passes are important in the scheduling. For a long road trip, car hire service can be taken for comfortable accommodation to get a vital pit-stop. Gift cards and travel money card are attractive choices that a traveller may engage and might buy. Travel money card is necessary as it replaces an average old credit card. Benefits and buybacks are available while using these cards. Hot deals are provided while booking flights and engaging into a reservation for hotels and other services.
Marketing activities
Website promotion is extensive on search engines and so does Flight Centre promote its website. Search engines play a vital role when searching for an excellent website for travel purpose. Flight Centre pops up in the search results when a person types best travel companies in Australia. This is the most effective way to reach a large number of customers, as it ensures sales and marketing (Raudelieniene 2018). Flight Centre is even available on Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram as is supports digital platform to engage travellers and customers to view the website and gain optimal sales and support. To reach global success, the company takes active steps in marketing. Therefore, visitors even download the flight centre app, which is an official app to book hotels, flights and gain good deals. No online booking fee is one such marketing initiative that attracts visitors to indulge in cheap hotels and secure flight bookings (Limba & Šidlauskas 2018). The marking activities include personalized expert advice that can lead to a critical attraction to chat and communicate with the expert for any help or booking offers. Therefore, the support team offers the best way to indulge customer and gain experience with required information and ease.
Negative aspects
The website contains some negative aspects while auditing. Critically, the necessary information that is provided is accurate to its context, but there are extra fees and terms and conditions that are mentioned with price changes at the end of the page. The visitor is not able to check all the details on a single page; instead, there are changes that are applied to the product’s page with additional charges that might apply. The website needs some changes in the design layout as it is not so attractive for visitors to indulge and straight away gain information. Colour of the site is not so beautiful in the web design.
7 C’s of customer interface
The 7 C’s of customer interface includes context, commerce, connection, communication, content, community and customization (Yang 2016).
Context: Flight Centre’s website’s layout and design are not up to the mark; a significant improvement in design need to be addressed. The visitor does not get attracted while visiting the website.
Commerce: Commercial transactions are appropriately managed in the website of Flight Centre. Therefore, the commerce element is highly capable of attracting visitors.
Communication: Effective communication is addressed that enabled the user’s connection to engage in two-way communication.
Connection: The website is linked to several accounts in terms of connecting visitors to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest.
Content: The images and text of the Flight Centre website are highly attractive. Images contain several pictures of Bali holidays, New York holidays and the best deals presented. Therefore, pictures and text are highly appreciative.
Community: Website does not have user communication which is a significant drawback. Contact with the support team is, however, a benefit.
Customization: The website has limited customization feature; therefore site’s ability to allow users to connect with the personalized feature is not present.
Different features
Flight Centre’s website has features of ease of navigation to which the search engines play a huge role in terms of the effectiveness of online branding. The website has chatbox to which a visitor can solve the query while connecting with the expert and gaining information while opening several pages to which great deals and extra services are available (Flight Centre 2019). There are positive features to which the home page of the website gets attracted based on the images and text included in the site.
Conclusion
The report concludes with the features of Flight Centre’s website. In the story, there are negative aspects and positive features of the site. The marketing activities such as the use of digital technology and social media website enhance the sales and growth of the business. Therefore, the discussion of website features such as pictures, texts, etc. have been mentioned while comparing 7 C’s customer interface. 7 C’s customer interface included content, community, customization, context, commerce, connection and communication.
References
Flight Centre, 2019, About Flight Centre Travel Group, [online] Available at: http://www.fctgl.com/about-us/
Flight Centre, 2019, Cheap Flights, [Online] Available at: https://www.flightcentre.com.au/flights
Karnowski, V, Kümpel, A S, Leonhard, L, Leiner, D J, 2017, From incidental news exposure to news engagement. How perceptions of the news post and news usage patterns influence engagement with news articles encountered on Facebook, Comput Human Behavior, vol. 76, pp. 42–50
Kwok, L & Yu, B, 2016, Taxonomy of Facebook messages in business-to-consumer communications: What really works? Tourism Hospitality Resource, vol. 16, pp. 311–328
Limba, T & Šidlauskas, A, 2018, Secure personal data administration in the social networks: The case of voluntary sharing of personal data on the Facebook. Entrepreneur Sustainability Issues, vol. 5, pp. 528–541.
Raudelieniene, J, Davidaviciene, V, Tvaronaviciene, M & Jonuska, L, 2018, Evaluation of advertising campaigns on social media networks, Sustainability, vol. 10, no. 973, pp. 1-14.
Yang, C, 2016, Analysis of e-commerce sites using the 7C Framework, by developing a software tool, Unitec Institute of Technology, Master of Computing, pp. 1-60.