It’s well know travel ecommerce is a price game. You either have the lowest price or you are out. But there is a another big success factor hiding behind the price obsession of online travel vendors: usability. For us at Exorbyte, the term “usability” associated with the large structured databases of travel products that the industry builds its online business on, means we can help.
I believe that the sheer complexity of the travel process makes usability a primary focus for travel customers. If you are buying a book on a poorly designed online store, all you risk is probably 2 or 3 clicks more until you figure our how to find, order and pay for your book. On a travel site, things can get 10 times uglier: flights, layovers, hotel descriptions, multi-airline trips, car rental insurance, rewards program preferences, dates, times, and countless other parameters factored in a complex trip design. That probably why Exorbyte is regularly approached by travel companies looking for a solution to complex catalog search problems. We have designed several solutions for the travel industry that I describe below.
Online Travel Bounce Graph
In an early 2010 survey of online travel stores (PhoCusWright – see right) high prices were the main driver to visitor bouncing off the sites. However, a long list of other reasons follow (not wanting to register, slow sites, frustration, information clutter, confusion, site crash, etc.) of which most could be defined by the term “bad usability”.
Gomez online travel loyalty
Loyalty is in short supply on the buyers side. Travel site operators have learned the hard way that users rarely give them more than a couple of chances to impress with their usability. 36% of users report in another study by Gomez (see above) in January this year that they wouldn’t stick around after a couple of bad usability experiences. 17% would even switch after the first failure. That’s an impatient bunch of people. If you travel once-in-a-while you can equate this phenomenon to the low tolerance for bad service and tendency to shout at ground airlines staff which airport travelers demonstrate when a flight is late or overbooked. At least, online they can just switch to a different vendor. So they do.
We have dabbled in travel usability at Exorbyte for a while. Here is an example of a European travel site that uses our intelligent autocomplete to set millions of airport transfer pick-up and drop-off locations: http://hotelshuttle.com/
See also the video below of one of our nicer travel UIs. One of the most neglected area is the sales of complex packages. As a user of sites like LastMinute you could think that the feeling of clutter and lack of context is purposeful because most packages are unsold low quality items for other travel agencies. However, this is often far from the truth. If you think advanced flight search is a big barrier to the free flow of traffic towards purchasing the ideal product (not sure about the exact name or ATA code for an airport for example), imagine what it looks like when the form is supposed to include parameters for flights, hotels, rental cars, trains, airport transfers, etc. All-in-one. That’s what we have been working with L’Tur (LastMinute’s biggest competitor in Europe) to resolve using a very advanced autocomplete we called FlexSearch. We must admit to failing to convince L’Tur to keep this up at their site because the conversion rate performance wasn’t proved but if you know anything about usability, you’ll enjoy and dream of the possibilities. See video below.
