Travel consumers help with web usability
By Darren Cronian on Friday, January 25th, 2008

Travel companies should ensure that their website is simple to use, and function to the needs of the user, so if the site offers online booking, the booking process should be seamless, within as few clicks as possible, and importantly, the site should be easy to navigate.

Travel consumers help with web usability

Earlier this month I sent an email to SideStep, highlighting an issue with their calendar, where it was displaying the wrong day when choosing a specific date. To be fair they got back to me quickly, informing me that they would be changes to the site soon, had I only known then that Kayak were replacing the UK version of Sidestep.

Today, I took a visit to Expedia to find that Jomo Kenyatta International Airport is located in the UK, amongst the likes of London Heathrow, not Kenya as it suggests on Wikipedia. Ok, so this a slight overview, but travel companies must spend a fortune on employing usability experts and testers.

I won’t get on to the subject of how many clicks it takes to make a booking on some sites, but I would like to I’d like to see companies interacting with consumers, maybe by creating a small, non technical consumer group who would give their thoughts on a sites launch or redesign.

I’d be interested to hear your opinions.


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17 responses to “Travel consumers help with web usability”

Kevin May | 25 January, 2008 at 11:29 pm

I would hazard a guess that most online travel companies go through usability testing with focus groups of consumers as well as professionals.

Whether they listen to them is the more important question…

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Darren Cronian | 26 January, 2008 at 10:15 am

Good point Kevin, but don’t you think they would be stupid not to listen? I’ve seen some sites offer a survey, but to be honest I think its not going to be time effective, when you can get a small group of people together.

Did you read my post on Cheapflights visiting blogs who had written about them and asking for their user experience? I was quite impressed.

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Garri | 26 January, 2008 at 10:43 am

Re: Cheapflights: another feather in the cap of blogging and and an example of one of the many benefits of using blogs and how ‘the conversation’ is so powerful.

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Darren Cronian | 26 January, 2008 at 10:47 am

I agree Garri.

It’s not difficult to find out who is talking about you on the internet with Google search, alerts, blog search, Technorati etc.

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Simon | 28 January, 2008 at 11:39 am

There was a presentation done by SiteStat last year at the Travel Technology Show on this subject. They took statistics from a number of different Tour Ops websites and came to the conclusion that 4 steps from Search Results is the optimum number.

It’s worth noting it depends on the holiday type you are booking. A single centre holiday is almost always going to be less clicks than a multi centre holiday.

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Darren Cronian | 28 January, 2008 at 12:52 pm

Simon, four clicks seems feasible, watch out for today’s post. I think it’ll be interesting reading.

Can you explain what you mean by a “Single centre” and “multi centre” I’ve heard the terminology before, and I think I have an idea what it means, but just for clarification.

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Darren Cronian | 28 January, 2008 at 1:30 pm

I was going to write a post about clicks on travel sites, but tried one site, and lost count. What is classed as a click by SiteStat, i.e. the booking options, i.e. choosing no insurance etc. is that classed as a click, or is is jut continue and submit button clicks? Or pages in the booking process?

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Darren McCowan | 29 January, 2008 at 11:18 am

Speaking as an affiliate that has recently “dipped his toe” into the travel industry, trying to build a user friendly travel website such as Last Minute Travel UK has proved a real challenge with the limited tech help from the travel companies. Hopefully we’ll have something usable and up and running within the next week.

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Darren Cronian | 29 January, 2008 at 11:44 am

Erm, this is the problem I have with affiliate sites. Did you put any thought into the business name. Or even think that there might be a trademark issue about using last minute within the domain for a travel website?

I’m sorry but as a consumer I would never use a site like yours.

I feel a rant coming on.

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Darren McCowan | 29 January, 2008 at 1:18 pm

In a word “yes”, there was a high degree of thought that went into the name and no there is no trademark issue. If as a consumer you don’t use sites like Last Minute Travel UK that’s perfectly fine but there are plenty that do. Affiliates are just people trying to make a little money just like everyone else and all major online businesses benefit greatly from its affiliate partners.

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Darren Cronian | 29 January, 2008 at 2:13 pm

There’s no doubt that affiliate advertising can be profitable, you only have to ask the owner of holidays uncovered who recently sold out to TUI Group. The difference is that they offer holiday reviews and added affiliate advertising on top, which worked well.

The sites that will struggle are those that are created to solely add affiliate banners, search and links and have little in the way of unique content. Unless you add something unique to your site [like a blog ;) ] you will struggle, in my opinion.

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Darren Cronian | 29 January, 2008 at 2:19 pm

Oh, and I am no trademark specialist, but according to the UK Intellectual Property Office database there are five pages of trademarked terms using lastminute or last minute.

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Darren McCowan | 29 January, 2008 at 2:43 pm

Your absolutely right, affiliate sites do need to offer something different but Rome wasn’t built in a day. I suppose a lot depends on the time and effort the affiliate can spend on each project and what level of rewards one expects.

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Simon | 29 January, 2008 at 4:22 pm

Single centre: One destination, for example, London to Palma, Majorca. You spend a week there, then come home.

Multi centre: 1+ destinations, for example, London to Dubai, stay in Dubai for a week, then fly on to Thailand for a week.

If memory serves me correctly, the “clicks” SiteStat were referring to were in fact page clicks – ie. the number of pages the user would click to go through to. Obviously this doesn’t take into consideration selecting extras, changing flights or accommodation, but if you were to include those things it’s almost endless, so it has to be looked at fairly simply when combining data from across the industry.

Four clicks is feasible so long as all the data is displayed clearly as you end up placing multiple options on a single page (eg. Extras Page may contain Insurance, Board Basis, Excursions, Car Hire, Transfers etc.).

SiteStat showed that in fact when you got up to 9 or 10 clicks, the sucess rate begun to increase again, and the reason was that this was for very specialist tour or multi-centre holidays where there have to be multiple steps for it to be user friendly.

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Darren Cronian | 30 January, 2008 at 1:33 am

Thanks for the explanation Simon, that’s helped me. I thought thats what multi-centre and single centre meant, just good to check the terminology sometimes.

Darren, well if your thinking about the content, and are wanting to be unique, well that’s a good start. I just see so many affiliate sites with the simple aim of slapping links and banners on a few web pages. To me this is nothing more than a link farm, and has no use whatsoever on the internet. But that’s my opinion.

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Marketing in tourism. Find new outlook on travel. | 4 February, 2008 at 10:59 pm

Five ways to make online travel sites better

1. Enable customers to choose how to sort results when they first start a search.
Customers will often choose to sort by price, but other options are useful, such as star ratings of hotels, departure times, direct flights and so on. Allowing customers …

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kathryn | 19 February, 2008 at 10:24 pm

I have recently booked flights to Barcelona and after searching extensively to find the best deal I decided to go with the advertised price on Travel Supermarket of £82, flying from Liverpool and back into Manchester, as the cheapest return to Manchester was £105. After booking the outbound flight with one company I tried to book the inbound flight (with a different company) to find the price quoted by Travel Supermarket had not included additional taxes of 33.80 euros. TravelSupermarket advertise their prices as including ‘all taxes’.

I live very close to Manchester airport and my flights have ended up costing me the same price as return flights to Manchester would have done, with the added inconvenience of travelling to Liverpool. I am obviously extremely dissapointed to have been misled in this way. After contacting TravelSupermarket regarding my concerns I was told to read the terms and conditions which state that they may not dispaly the correct prices. So what is the point of this website?

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