Caleb
Brown
Danielle
Mattice
Erika
Katzberg
Gloria
Fong
Luke
Houlden
Summary:
Web site
design was mostly quite similar; most were colorful and used a lot of animation
and pictures. Some sites were a bit plain though. Sites were simple and
uncluttered, easy to use and sort through. Content was separated accordingly,
generally by park and geographic area. Revenue online is generated from online
ticket sales; although these sites are generally a brochure to advertise the
park and services. This market competes for locals and tourist money. They
offer entertainment, shopping, and dining.. The target market is generally
families and tourists. Since these tend to be large organizations they own a
majority of the products and services they sell, rather than creating partnerships.
Customer Service Management for amusement parks is less developed than
expected. Because kids and younger people would be probably be the ones to view
the site the most. There should be tailored sections and services for them, to
keep them coming back regularly and possibly updating parents. There could also
be more interactive medium such as a chat line discussing trips and rides.
Disneyland
offers registration methods for teen and children if kids to offer a more
tailored message. Parents are likely to check out the site only when they are
looking to visit the park or are thinking about it, while children will view it
more frequently.
All sites are
branded for fun and excitement, and all sites allow tickets for the parks to be
bought online, but no merchandise. Trust factors are not strongly communicated,
they are probably assumed though the reputation of the companies. A few of the
ordering processes were quite confusing, whether they allow Canadian consumers
or not.
The sites that I chose to research were consumer oriented, but only information based. Each of these sites didn’t differ much in what they had to offer but had very different web sites in how they were set up. The strength of offering an information based site is that it complements the mountain and builds excitement and demand for the products that they offer, however, the weakness to having only an information based site is that there is no next step offered online. A consumer must get off the internet and either phone or go through a travel agent and if a person doesn’t want to do this, the mountain might lose business due to this fact. For the most part, having the web site is very useful in generating traffic to the resort.
Restaurants offer the same thing, food, therefore they do not customize their websites to suit each person since these people would need to go to the restaurant to try out anything. It would also depend on what each of their target markets are. One of the retaurants only used their website as a brochure, by having information on it, but the only interaction there were is with an email and phone number. From this it would be shown that most of the customer interaction would be in the restaurant itself. Other websites included more customer services by offering gift certificates to be bought online, and bookings to be done through the internet in various forms. However, this is not fully automated since a person still needs to be contacted via email, phone, etc. Depending on the restaurant group menu with group bookings were also allowed.
Generally speaking all the above sites are good sites. They are all fairly simple yet attractive. They all have the ability to purchase tickets online and they show alternative ways to purchase tickets through other various mediums. All of the sites were easy to use. Air Canada did the best job of maximizing the amount of information, while minimizing the confusion of finding and using that information. All of the sites were very sleek looking, but load times were minimal. West Jet was the only site that I found with B2B sales other than investor information. They all contained company information such as mission statements and history. The two larger companies offered baggage and flight tracking which I thought was a good idea, but other than that I thought that the CRM was weak for the sites. Air Canada was the best at walking the customer through the purchasing process and even the product usage process but they didn’t have the ability to book hotels or car rentals through the site, which is something that West Jet did well.
One consistent thing that all the sites did well was provide testimonials to different stages in the purchasing process.