The internet has helped me search for holidays and weekend breaks in my own time but it is incredibly frustrating sometimes when a design flaw forces you to jump through hoops. A lot of thought is put into the look of the site but not a great deal is put into the usability.
I am not a web designer but here are a few examples of what I would call design flaws
Back button syndrome
Possibly one of the most annoying flaws, when you choose search criteria, click search, the results appear, but you’ve made a mistake or they’re no results. So, you click on the back button and all of your search criteria has disappeared.
Content for spiders and robots
You arrive on the search page or the search results, but have to scroll down tons of text and images that is written not for the human reader but for the search engine spiders and bots. Some of the text is incredibly badly written for humans and doesn’t help using the website.
Searching without sunglasses
I do not need your fancy flash and animated banners all over the page to entice me to book a flight. Look at the Ryanair or Jet2.com websites for good examples. I want to use your site to search, and I might want to book without the need for dark sunglasses. Some of these sites should carry warnings.
Mind reading websites
The main culprits are the low cost airline sites where by default the travel insurance and other additional extras are ticked. You then scroll and scroll past the hotel and car rental ads to find the total price includes these extras when you not want them.
The next point is not really a flaw; it’s just something I would like to see on more travel websites.
Holidays not for the open minded
Let’s pretend that I have a week off work in June and I have no idea where I want to go on holiday so why can I not choose all destinations and a date, number in the party and then filter out any undesirable holidays in the search results.
Next is more of an organisational rant rather than a flaw.
Taking cheese from the mouse
Your PR agency sends out a press release that is offering bargain holiday or hotel deals. You know it’s going to generate a lot of media attention yet, you have not taken into consideration the extra bandwidth that the traffic is going to generate, so the website crashes. Highly annoying.
I could go on and on but now it’s your turn. What design flaws annoy you about travel websites?
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Kevin May | 17 February, 2009 at 8:35 pm
In no particular order (and not necessarily nuts and bolts design flaws, but things that contribute to a poor user experience):
1) No breadcrumb trail (users are unable to navigate easily around a site – critical in travel during the transaction process).
2) Poorly written content (can damage a brand if copy is riddled with spelling and/or grammatical errors).
3) Ignorance of web accessibility standards.
brennan | 17 February, 2009 at 9:17 pm
Darren-
Nice list, I definitely concur with you on all of those! We just recently fixed a search issue with the back button on our site. We now cache the search result, so hitting the back button gets you back to where you were and enables you to re-formulate your search.
Sam Daams | 17 February, 2009 at 11:13 pm
Excellent post Darren; stumbled and will revisit to pick all those readers’ brains 
Pat | 18 February, 2009 at 5:45 am
Nice list, if I wasn’t ssoooooo.. tired I would add to it, but wanted to let you know…
NICE LIST!!
Thanks!
Jessica | 18 February, 2009 at 9:54 am
Websites that are designed to confuse.
Ryanair is a major culprit. At present with the speedy boarding option they have Yes and No radio buttons for speedy boarding. But if you select the No radio button you then have to confirm on a dialog box where the wording of the question is very confusing. It’s designed to trip you up.
Ryanair also seems to change their processes every couple of months. Every time I book a flight I have to be paying extra special attention.
Rohan | 18 February, 2009 at 10:24 am
I agree. It annoys me that the holiday is x amount at the start and within my modest budget but when you get to the end the holiday is more expensive and out of my budget. This might not be a design flaw but why is the actual price not quoted at the beginning of the booking??
Dave Littlewood | 18 February, 2009 at 10:25 am
Darren you are SPOT ON with this article. Long time reader, first time commenting but felt that I should backup your points in the hope that people from the travel industry listen to what you have to say.
Dom | 18 February, 2009 at 10:45 am
Daily I come across travel websites that look wonderful but the content and navigation is dreadful. It is okay using buzz words and fancy graphics but please could we see some common sense and create something that is user friendly.
Darren Cronian | 18 February, 2009 at 12:03 pm
@ Dom
That is one of my gripes. Nice looking websites do not necessary mean that its good for users. Like you I have come into contact with travel websites that look great, but do not deliver.
@ Rohan
Yes, that is an issue which is appearing alot in comments and emails lately. I am not technical enough to understand why they have to have the total price at the end, and not when the customer starts searching/booking.
Maybe someone from a tour operator or travel agency could confirm?
Dean Evans | 18 February, 2009 at 3:59 pm
Does anyone else find they need sunglasses when trying to make sense of the Ryanair homepage? One other thing that really irritates me about low cost carrier sites is when you click through to their flight sales page and click on a flight with price only to find it fills out the search gadget for you without dates so you have no way of knowing what dates the cheap flight applies to! Very sneaky!
Darren Cronian | 18 February, 2009 at 4:26 pm
@ Dean
I received two emails complaining about the err flashing Ryanair calendar banner back in December on the homepage.
Pauline | 18 February, 2009 at 4:43 pm
I agree with Dom.
Could we see some common sense, something more useful and less ‘flashy’ ?
I’m not minimalist but I am pragmatic. Nice list ! Excellent post.
Jeremy Head | 18 February, 2009 at 8:10 pm
I work for an SEO agency… and you know, SEO is a real culprit in all this… pages added for no reason other than to attract google searches… drives me NUTS
Darren Cronian | 18 February, 2009 at 9:08 pm
@ Jeremy
Glad you agree, I do think SEO is part to blame, but I don’t think its the main culprit. I think there’s a lot of companies that forget the basics (what happened to the 3 click to booking process) that seems to have gone out of the window. I don’t have to tell you how important content is, so rather than creating these crappy pages for the search engines why don’t more travel companies create a err blog! You have quality written content and user generate content in one place.
Sam Daams | 18 February, 2009 at 9:14 pm
Google is at least partly to blame to be honest. On a booking site, minimal clutter is what works best for consumers. Yet for Google a lot of text works really well. The two don’t jive…
Paul Davey | 18 February, 2009 at 9:19 pm
I work for a design agency and Jeremy is absolutely correct. Search Engine Optimisation is one of the fundamental aspects of a design when the specification is completed by the client. Usability is a close second I am afraid when a site is required to generate revenue.
Money talks.
Irv | 18 February, 2009 at 10:29 pm
Great list — especially the point about “Mind reading Websites” and the fancy flash animation. Pop-ups make me crazy too. Excellent post — thanks!
brennan | 18 February, 2009 at 11:52 pm
One of the things that we are trying to do as a new travel company is to break open the existing mold and focus on user driven content (reviews). That being said, we also provide quality expert written articles. My initial reaction to the general question about why travel websites have bad UI is simple, they don’t spend enough time on it. My second answer is that a lot of sites are tied to the booking engine providers which run systems that had their start in the travel agent databases from the ’70′s and ’80′s. As for putting the prices at the end of the process, I do wish that it were easier to put them at the beginning of the process. In order to obtain the exact price for an airline ticket or hotel, you need to give the system the times you are going to be traveling, otherwise the data presented is only a general figure. On our site, we use hotels.com/expedia as our booking engine. In our list view, we display the “from $ amount” because that is the best we can do until someone actually specifies the dates, type of seat they want, or type of hotel room.
Natalie | 19 February, 2009 at 10:26 am
I completely agree about not being able to select all destinations. I find this increasingly frustrating when looking for a holiday. 9 times out of 10 i’m not fussy about the destination and I’m looking to book based purely on price and just want to find somewhere hot & sunny and I find I have to continually press the back button to select another location – but by then all my other details I entered have disappeared so I have to go through the whole process of selecting the date, price, number of people etc all over again!! I then get annoyed and try to find another website where I don’t have this problem
Jason | 19 February, 2009 at 11:15 am
I am still surprised by the number of travel websites that are not compatible with Firefox and Chrome. More and more users are preferring alternatives to Internet explorer.
Julie Brook | 19 February, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Natalie/Darren I am with you on the not having the option of choosing all destinations or even a selection of a number of destinations, rather than just having to choose one country and then a resort.
Darren Cronian | 19 February, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Thanks for the comments everyone, keep them coming.
Travel companies are reading this so keep your thoughts and opinions on design flaws that annoy you as a consumer. Hopefully, someone will take this information away and use if to their benefit.
Natalie | 19 February, 2009 at 12:58 pm
Kevin – lets hope the travel companies will follow your top tips!! Especially in the current economic climate when they’re needing as much business as possible – they need to improve their websites so that consumers will be more tempted to book with them. It makes a big differance as I know how frustrated I get when I’ve got limited hours in the day to search and book a holiday and the experience is a long or repetitive process!!
Martino | 19 February, 2009 at 1:27 pm
Thanks for the list Darren. We all know these things, but too often get caught up in adding content and thinking about the user experience afterwards. We launched a new beta version of our site few months ago and got immediately slapped on the wrist for trying to be too clever. Our users, who for years had the very simplest of search engines – on WhichBudget, you don’t fill forms, you just follow links – did not appreciate us adding forms, interracting with maps, etc. Needless to say, we’ve gone back to the drawing board. The funny thing is, all of the things we did were the same things they asked for, we just didn’t design it well enough.
Lesson learned: technology is secondary, experience is the king.
Sally Watkins | 19 February, 2009 at 2:16 pm
OVERDESIGN drives me crazy. Just let at at the information! Don’t be cute, don’t be whiz-bang, just make the information easy to get to and the site easy to navigate.
Fiona Canavan | 20 February, 2009 at 9:39 am
Great article. Having worked worked on a number of travel websites at the Technology Studio, and being aware of other travel websites it’s apparent that there is often a lack of planning in creating the website. Search engine optimisation is often bolted on at the end, without a thought for the real users of the site. There also seems to be lots of companies who have shoehorn ed the website around the reservation system and the way it is storing the information. Without proper user testing, with real people actually using the site before it goes live, some serious mistakes are made in terms of usability which are difficult to correct at a later stage.
Anthony Leyton | 20 February, 2009 at 11:01 am
Am nursing two pet hates at the moment:
1. Flash is a constant nightmare. I use websites to get information, not to watch web design studios playing with themselves in public. There’s I have yet to see an intro sequence that has a point to it, and I certainly don’t need to listen to a light jazz soundtrack to inspire me, thank you very much. (And I also don’t want your site to pop up in a new window when I’m browsing with tabs – what makes your site so special that it deserves a window to itself, eh?)
2. Worse than spelling errors or bad grammar are sites written in Travelish – that peculiar florid non-language adopted by hotels and travel guides that’s filled with impressive sounding adjectives but withers into meaninglessness if given more than a nanosecond’s scrutiny:
“Bathroom has became part protagonist of the design, integrating the concept of luxury, neutrality and elegance of the rest of the spaces.”
What. Does. That. Even. Mean?
Martino | 20 February, 2009 at 2:21 pm
@ Anthony, your second comment has been forwarded to our editorial team.
Darren Cronian | 20 February, 2009 at 2:30 pm
@ Anthony
Completely agree with both points
@ Martino
Good to see travel companies listening to bloggers/commentors feedback
Caitlin | 25 February, 2009 at 8:56 pm
- Music
- A flash intro or any site where you have to click ‘enter’ and then the site opens in a new window
- Not having the contact details (address, phone number and email address or online contact form) prominently displayed.
- Not giving you the prices for the dates on either side of your preferred day of travel.
- Auto-selecting ‘yes’ that you want products that you actually don’t want such as insurance or carbon offsetting.
Rooi | 26 February, 2009 at 3:02 pm
Good SEO uses content that humans and search engines like. I think there are many reasons why companies put up badly written content: they’re in a rush; they just don’t care that it’s bad; they hired an incompetent writer.
And flash does not equal a great site. When will people realise this?
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