NB: This is a guest article by Jason Dickson, head of site optimisation at Expedia Affiliate Network.
Recent research showed that travellers in emerging markets were around 30% more likely to be frustrated by their experience of researching travel online than those in developed countries.
With communications infrastructure in these regions often being slow and unreliable, this difference in the report from PhoCusWright and Amadeus should not come as too much of a shock.
However, the actual numbers are a little more surprising. Between 72% and 78% of travellers in Brazil, Russia and India were frustrated by their online travel experience – compared to 42% and 48% in the UK and US respectively.
The fact that nearly half of UK and US travellers going online come away frustrated should worry online travel retailers, in what is a fiercely competitive industry.
With high speed broadband, intelligent search, fast browsers and high-quality screens now commonplace, web browsing is now able to offer an unrivalled experience for the traveller researching their trip online.
The business opportunity here is clear – the site with the most helpful browsing experience will likely be the one that becomes the regular traveller’s default option.
By far the biggest complaint expressed by travellers using the web in the UK and US was being forced to sift through too much information.
That includes both searching the web and searching within a site, but with both SEO techniques and sorting and filtering tools advancing all the time, these frustrations really are needless.
Tailoring content so users can easily find it using search engines is relatively simple. It goes a long way to tick the boxes of: personalised and well organised search results, relevant links and keywords, and rich, multimedia content.
In addition, ensuring that your site has fresh, unique and regularly updated content is no longer difficult, and will do wonders for its discoverability.
Once visitors are within your site, allowing them to define relevant search parameters is crucial.
For example, if they searched for "hotels with fitness centre", they should be able to filter immediately to see only those hotels with proper gym facilities.
In addition, being able to offer deals and packages based upon a traveller’s previous choice of products can take a great deal of the hassle out of booking a trip.
For example, BMI recently reported a marked upturn in their hotel sales, after implementing technology which infers a traveller’s profile from their choice of flight, and then automatically offers an appropriate selection of hotels.
Other frustrations reported included being uncertain that information was up to date, and that it was difficult to search based on a preference such as a secluded location. There shouldn’t really be any excuses for these.
After all, it’s very easy to date your content and update it regularly.
Allowing visitors a greater range of options should also be relatively straightforward – with current technology this simply means ensuring that you have access to a sufficiently large product inventory to guarantee that even the travellers with the most demanding criteria can return a choice of relevant results.
The PhoCusWright-Amadeus survey draws attention to the fact that, as the online travel industry continues to mature, a great many travel sites are still not doing the basics right – and are missing business opportunities as a result.
NB: This is a guest article by Jason Dickson, head of site optimisation at Expedia Affiliate Network.
NB2: Smash laptop image via Shutterstock.