At the Airline Information Conference, Amadeus showed a study that they conducted, comparing major airlines with regional LCC, and this study showed that most LCC had more steps in their journey than most full service airlines. LCC often requested information sooner, such as an email address, which enabled personalisation and basket abandonment, but many had a number of additional steps.
Amadeus wanted to see how this impacted the user experience. They mapped the time to complete a booking against the number of steps.
What they determined was even with more steps, if the steps are fast and easy (no bullying) that the LCC had a positive experience with the user. Those who were slow negatively impacted the experience.
This shows that more steps doesn’t adversely impact the journey as long as we can handle the information being asked. Its likely to relate to the fact that our memory can only recall information for a limited amount of time. Breaking down steps, enables us to answer effectively, to the LCC’s benefit (to personalise, recover bookings), and also provide a positive experience.