First impressions matter when Booking a Holiday Online
By Darren Cronian on Saturday, September 22nd, 2007

Travel companies need to improve some aspects of the online booking experience because first impressions do matter. Travel consumers will quickly move on if they come up against technical or user-ability issues, and will more than likely never visit that site again.

First impressions matter when Booking a Holiday online

I remember a few years ago, I visited the Expedia website, ran a holiday search and found it to be 30% more expensive than other online travel agencies. I’ve booked several holidays since and I have never returned back to Expedia – despite the amount of TV adverts.

For the past two weeks I have been using the internet to search for a holiday and whilst searching I noted a few observations that I want to share:

Airport transfer times

An estimated time of transfer will do, but none of the travel sites I visited had this information on its website. I loved the look of one apartment in Crete, great reviews, but I found out on a Trip Advisor review that it took three hours to get to the accommodation which I wasn’t prepared to do.

Negative points about the accommodation

I know why companies don’t add negative points about the accommodation, but it’s important to know if the apartment is at the top of a hill, and the coach will drop you off at the bottom, and you have a 10 minute up-hill walk to the apartment.

Only one website included this type of information, and that’s a pat on the back for Olympic Holidays and one of the reasons why I booked my holiday with them.

Printer Friendly

I know it’s not environmentally friendly printing paper, but when I have spent hours searching for a holiday I don’t want to read all of the information on the monitor, so I like to print it out and read it in my own time.

Very few sites offered a printer friendly option.

Quality of Photographs

On the majority of sites I visited the quality of the photographs are poor, either too small or blurry and I’m sure most travel consumers are like me in that they make their decision on the look of the accommodation.

The Verdict

Thomson provided the best experience by allowing me to shortlist holidays, displayed plenty of photographs, videos of the resort and accommodation. But My Travel, provided very little information, and small photographs on a dated looking website.

Most unhelpful telephone conversation was with Late Deals.co.uk, who just didn’t appear to want to help me. On the other hand Olympic Holidays telephone conversation was helpful, but the conversation wouldn’t have to taken place if estimated airport transfer times were on the site.


Related Posts:





Subscribe to RSS Submit to StumbleUpon Bookmark page

10 responses to “First impressions matter when Booking a Holiday Online”

Colin Maddocks | 23 September, 2007 at 2:57 pm

Hi Darren,

Glad you got fixed up. We’re a web-based travel agency and I understand your comments regarding information online, good and bad. My first boss in travel, years ago, told me a good travel agent is one that will actually refuse to take a booking from a client because he knows the hotel/accommodation is rubbish.

Nowadays a lot of online travel agents think that having a fully automated site, (where clients can book the whole holiday themselves without speaking to an agent) is the be all and end all.

We’ve not gone down that route as we feel that the chance to speak to a client at some point in the transaction allows us to inject our bit of knowledge, the type of things you wanted to know.

So we’re walking a fine line with giving the correct amount of information whilst hopefully encouraging clients to call us for that last bit of extra input from ourselves. An example being our http://www.Nile-Cruises-4u.co.uk.

If anyone can suggest other ways that we, as online travel agents, can improve the experience I would love to receive comments.

Have a great holiday,

Colin

Darren Cronian | 23 September, 2007 at 8:48 pm

Thanks for dropping by Colin.

Do you have Google Analytics on your website to monitor if people are coming on to the site and leaving quickly?

The reason why I ask is that the site has tons of quality information, videos, reviews, testimonials, but I struggled to find the holidays.

I’m assuming you put package cruise holidays together for the but this doesnt seem highlighted within the site, and it made me wonder if your getting people visiting but going elsewhere to search for holidays.

Just a thought.

Rohan | 23 September, 2007 at 10:51 pm

Great write up Darren.

I agree about the distance for the airport transfer to the hotel or apartment.

Debbie | 24 September, 2007 at 9:36 pm

I have had a bad experience with airport transfer.

We booked a package deal with the children and we found out on the coach that it was a two hour airport transfer.

Why didn’t the agent tell us this if they knew we have kids?

Darren Cronian | 24 September, 2007 at 10:00 pm

Rohan, thanks! :)

Debbie, good question. I found that I was asking questions that the agent should of maybe asked when I was asking for information about the holiday resort and accommodation.

Anthony Hook | 2 October, 2007 at 9:55 am

Hi Darren

I agree, i sometimes find that sites dont offer a good user experience, we have found our user experience on Packyourbags.com to be quite user friendly, however we are now launching into our winter season where we have just completed a new flight search and will be re-launching holiday early next year.

What advice can you give to a web developer who is making user friendliness, accessibility and design his main focus over technical gadgetry?

Look forward to hearing from you.

Anthony

Darren Cronian | 2 October, 2007 at 6:58 pm

Well, alot of my pet peeves with sites are included in the post, but my advice would be put yourself in the eyes of a holidaymaker, and try and get people who are not internet saavy to test the site out.

Colin Maddocks | 3 October, 2007 at 8:42 am

I think the problem we, as web-based travel agents, face is walking a fine line between ALL of the things we want our potential clients to see or be able to access and the important subject of good design, user-friendliness and accessibility.

Most of us, (web-based travel agents) are usually reasonably “net-savvy” which is why we went online to begin with, but we’re not all experts in design and web-technology etc, to the extent that we would like to be.

A lot of the big names in web-travel, TUI, Last Minute, etc, have budgets that we can only dream of.

So creating a user-friendly, well-designed website is really an on-going process. Hopefully improving all the time, but never ending.

Hope that made sense? :-)

Anthony Hook | 3 October, 2007 at 12:43 pm

Well I dont find budget is an issue here, it is more of an issue that without conducting extensive user testing, the kind where you haul them off the street and give them money for their time etc, where do you focus your efforts.

When providing the best user experience (regardless of SEO), is it on well written, gramatically perfect content and accommodation descriptions. Is it big, quality pictures of the accommodation, is it simple 3 step booking processes, is it user reviews integrated from trip advisor or else where?

What really sells it to the customer, i suppose most would say, its a mixture of all of them.

I do agree with you that online agents such as ourselves do have to walk that fine line. I hope i am able to take our sites to that line quickly!

Another thought is, do those bigger sites like Expedia, Lastminute and TUI with their endless budgets really make great user experiences that are accessible, simple and friendly? I beg to differ, I tried talking my father (on the phone) through booking a Eurostar trip on Expedia, after 10 mins he got so annoyed he just phoned up one of my call centre staff to book it for him, he was clearly not given a good experience by them, he’s no computer idiot, bearing in mind he uses one in his job every day, he paid £40 more in the end, but ended up a happy customer.

I do find larger sites with dynamic packaging sometimes very complicated (no names) and with out feeling to cocky, being a young guy who generally understand all web things this must mean a lot of people who are just like my dad probably experience the same woes.

Its a shame because those smaller online agents and sites who offer great, friendly online booking experiences backed up by good call centres and administration teams are losing out to those bigger sites who set the tone for the majority of people who are just discovering online booking.

Anyway enough ranting for now, back to trying to find the online booking user experience equilibrium…

Darren Cronian | 3 October, 2007 at 1:07 pm

Anthony,

I’m on the ‘day job’ right now, so I’ll respond better later.

If you want a tester I’d be happy to offer my services, from a consumer perspective [I'm not a techie!]

Please post a comment