Travel sites focus on conversion, as competition is set to heat up

this latest study done in the UK says. I find the title misleading, as the word “should” is missing. As in “travel sites should” focus on conversion, which I don’t see thm actually doing. If they did, more of the tools generally described under the web 2.0 label for lack of a better term, would be seen on the major travel player’s websites.

The figures in this report pretty much mirror what’s been reported elsewhere in the past few months about the market, both in the UK, Europe and the U.S. In general, the public is using the web as the major travel research and planning tool and a great many want to use it also for booking. The reason they don’t actually book there is due to a still very often disappointing customer experience. As long as that is the case, I doubt that the players are actually focusing on conversion but rather on attracting traffic.

What the online traveler actually doesn’t need are dozens more new websites offering the latest cool web 2.0 inspired tools but only offering one part of the online travel buying experience. What’s the use of a great hotel video website when the booking then has to take place on another site and the air booking on another one still, and then comes the car rental or train ticket and the dinner reservation, and it goes on and on – all on different sites!

No, what’s needed for conversion to increase is a new and improved, comprehensive, one-stop shopping experience for the entire travel product. At the risk of repeating myself, as I’ve said this so many times in the past, a true dynamic packaging, multiple-component, multi-destination planning, research and buying experience is what customers deserve and want, although I haven’t seen them  describing this in any major study yet.

Eventually this will happen over the next few years, as the technology keeps evolving, with data talking to data and intelligent agents doing the hard work in the background, resulting in less work by users at the front end. The age of the semantic, or intelligent web then becomes a reality. Some will call it web 3.0, which doesn’t matter as long as the reality is what brings better business results.

Tags: , , , ,

Twitter It!

This entry was posted on Monday, August 27th, 2007 at 3:52 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • For anyone with a travel website, BookingWiz offers a great tool to convert bookings. It's great for the user too, of course. I use it on iGuide - http://iguide.travel - the Interactive Travel Guide, and people love it. I agree, conversion today rule, since who knows, tomorrow might never happen for some sites.
  • Markus,

    A majority of travel bookings will be done online in the U.S. this year. The web has evolved as a tool that goes beyond collecting information and then go offline for a booking that was the reality in the late '90s at the beginning. Where this is still true, is in the complex travel market, which is what I covered in my post.

    As for high resolution photography, this is certainly useful - as is increasingly video - but it has to be available where the eyeballs are, in places like YouTube and Flickr and so on.

    Joe
  • Stephen,

    Yes, I know. That's exactly the challenge as none of this is reality today and I personally doubt the technology for these systems will be affordable for small suppliers.

    Joe
  • From a technologist's perspective, in order to reach that point of consolidated bookings, we need more web services offered by the various suppliers. The key issues are control of the distribution of product and the complexity of pricing. If the systems are there and they are affordable enough for small suppliers and simple enough to integrate together by innovative developers, then new services could be built at relatively low cost that provide an all in one booking experience.
  • You are right! What I focus on with my project HOLIDAYS-SWITZERLAND.CH is to show interested people pictures of Swiss destinations in hight resolution what I sometimes miss at other websites.

    I think many people still prefer to book their jurney in a travel-office with a professional advice, after they informed themselfes thrugh the internet. It'll also be a question of money: Online-booking will be cheaper then booking in a traveloffice but mostly elder people will prefer this way I can imagine.

    Yours

    Markus Müller
blog comments powered by Disqus