PHL airport start page
irport websites are a missed opportunity to increase sales and make for a pleasant stay. While many people browse the airline websites for travel tips on baggage, security checkpoint details, and of course flight details and schedules, very few people would actually go to the airport website to look up flight schedules. Indeed, most visitors come to the website while already at the airport (72%).
The bounce rate of non-on-site visitors is 95% (go figure that!), versus 54% on-site visitors. On-site visitors spend about 4.2 minutes on the site (versus 22 seconds). For obvious reasons the pages most views with off-site visitors are the directions, parking, and public transportation (quite uncommon for Americans). I wonder how much information one could possible gather after 22 seconds.
ut a detailed view into on-site visitors reveals the real terror: the 4.2 minutes are spent looking for food & shops and terminal maps, but never get there! they are trying to click the right maps, but downloads never succeed. A quick look at their browsers shows why: over the last 3.5 months we see a rapid (and I mean rapid!) increase of mobile browsers: iPhones, G1, Opera Mobile, Windows Mobile, etc. Generally no big deal, but most of them didn’t don’t have the right flash version installed, and drop-down menu lists are not really helpful.
The PHL website does have a “ADA Compliant Text Only” version — for everyone wondering: ADA stands for Americans with Disability Act. Note that there is only an english version available, no international choice (great for an international airport). In fact 24% of the visitors had a German or otherwise foreign OS or browser installed (mobile and PC-based browsers). At least it says “Text Only” in the title, so I can kind of guess what that means.
ADA Compliant Text Only Version of PHL.org
But here comes the text-only website: the first items are
At least the next ones are interesting (Flight Info), and then of course any visitor wants to learn something about the history and management team of PHL (about 0.2% of the visitors actually did!).
The News and Community page is also very 90ties like, nothing like a social community, or such… and at the very bottom, hurray, we get to the Directions & Parking, Help Desk, Food & Shops, and the Visitor’s Guide.
BTW: if you were looking at the “Terminal Maps and Airlines” link in the text-only sitemap, make sure you have your glasses on, because that link you’ll only find in the fine-print at the bottom of the page, in a font-size=-2 html attribute. While I understand that this is a “text-only” part of the page, I will not have any idea about the terminal map, because there is no description about it. Funny that directions is something that Americans with Disabilities don’t need.
BTW^2: I hope you have flash installed for the graphics-version of the terminal map, or at least can display PDF files. Or you go to Google and click the respective deep-search link to the html version of the document, just to discover it’s a wrapper to a graphics element that Google will not display – if it’s a graphic, why not say so and display the graphic? why wrap it in PDF? Yes, a downloadable high-def version is nice, but not for a quick lookup, a quick navigation, etc.
Of course, the Food & Shops site is also an external link to the Philadelphia MarketPlace Food, Shops & Services at http://www.philamarketplace.com/. And that is English-only, of course, lots of graphics, and roll-over / roll-down menus, which are really hard to invoke with touch-screens and mobile browsers that don’t understand what a “rollover” action is (unless you have a Blackberry Storm, of course).
Fangs Screen Reader Output of PHL Food & Markets Website
twiddle along with the trackball of my G1, just to find out that the navigation structure is not in the right order, and <h1>, <h2>, and <h3> html tags are used arbitrarily, I guess screen readers will have their fun with that site, too.
All in all a desperate experience, while they could really capitalize on the situation and circumstances of international travellers, with web-site discounts, coupons, treasure hunts, advertisements, etc. But I guess government regulation prevents most of such customer-oriented approaches…
A quick update: There is actually a regulation regarding the wording for disabled or “phyiscally challenged” website access for airports (sic!), and a liability if you offer content in another language and make a mistake in translation or have outdated content… go figure…