Applause, the company that helps clients like Google, Netflix, Amazon and RunKeeper test apps in real-world conditions, this week released "The State of the U.S. Travel Apps Economy," a report that monitors the quality of travel apps across five industries: travel booking, hotels, airlines, cruise and car rentals.
Using Applause Analytics, a mobile app analytics tool that aggregates every rating and review from top app stores such as the Apple App Store and Google Play, Applause ranked the app quality across 31 of the largest travel brands.
"What we wanted to do is actually start to create these types of research reports that help companies benchmark themselves and even help thought leaders and pundits benchmark the industry," said Matt Johnston, chief strategy and marketing officer for Applause.
"If you take a step back and take a look at what mobile really represents, it's an opportunity for companies to interact with their users when and where their users choose, and there's no better example of that than in the travel industry," Johnston added. "It could happen at a beach, it could happen at the airport, it could even happen when in transit…It's vitally important because it's allowing you to reach right into their pockets."
Brands' apps were given scores from 0 to 100 based on the customer reviews and star ratings, with 0-39 being "poor," 40-59 being "fair," 60-69 being "good," 70-89 being "excellent," and 90-100 "winning."
Not surprisingly, travel booking apps garnered the greatest average score among the five travel categories (63), while hotels (40), airlines (33), cruise (31) and car rentals (27) followed.
So, what were the top brands?
The top five travel brands for both iOS and Android (more than 20,000 ratings and reviews) were: Booking.com (score of 85), TripAdvisor (78), Kayak (77), TripIt (73) and Hotels.com (67).
The top three brands for iOS were TripAdvisor, Kayak and TripIt, with an honorable mention for Booking.com.
The top four brands for Android were Booking.com, TripAdvisor, Hotels.com and Kayak.
Alaska Airlines led other carriers by a large margin, garnering a score of 79 (the No. 2-ranked airline scored 39). One of the major surprises for Johnston when looking at the study was the degree of variance between the leaders and other competitors in certain industries like the airline industry.
"You would think in a relatively mature industry, there should be nothing in their business where one competitor is five times as good as another competitor," said Johnston, speaking of Applause's app scores. "They would never do that with the quality of their food, or with their maintenance of the aircraft or the training of their staff. It's really rare in a mature industry to see something as high profile and important as mobile (with) such a disparity."
National (54), Norwegian Cruise Line (38) and InterContinental and Starwood (each with 60) led the car rentals, cruise and hotels categories, respectively.
Applause selected the top 49 travel brands-based on "distinguished industry sources and independent research and analysis companies that specialize in marketshare tracking and revenue reporting"-and then identified which of these brands had a mobile app (bringing the total number down to 31).
Some critics of user reviews note that they aren't as reliable because users can sometimes be too quick to react or rate on things that aren't normally prioritized by the industry.
"I agree with that when the data set is small," Johnston said. "When you start looking at (a large data set), you are no longer talking about outliers. You actually have a normalized data set at that point."
In that sense, Johnston was quick to point out that the cruise data wasn't as reliable, considering only two major cruise lines were compared and no cruise line had more than 260 combined iOS and Android reviews.
On the other hand, most of the companies in the other industries each had thousands of reviews, making the report's overall validity strong, Johnston said.
Johnston also said there were some commonalities among low-scoring apps that brands should heed. For one, app developers who scored poorly generally didn't utilize location-based data to their full advantage.
"Users expectations' are that you're going to be smart enough to use my location (and) use it intelligently," Johnston said.
The frequency of crashes and poor usability were also weaknesses users highlighted in the reviews.
With mobile app usage exploding across the travel industry and beyond, it's more important than ever for companies to have apps that serve their customers well and don't crash. "The State of the U.S. Travel Apps Economy" bi-annual report (for release in the spring and fall of each year) will ideally allow companies to have a better idea of what customers think and adjust accordingly.
"Just because launching mobile applications is more complex, it doesn't change users' expectations," Johnston said. "It's a very high bar, but ultimately users aren't going to change their perceptions-they'll just change their loyalty."
"The State of the U.S. Travel Apps Economy" is part of a running series of industry-specific reports from Applause. There has already been a report published about the retail industry.
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