The number one goal of any travel company is to increase conversion. The higher the conversion, the better the profit. You've heard it many times before.
There are, of course, multiple and age-old methodologies to achieve this goal.
Current disruptive technologies like mobile, social and - the far lesser talked about - analytics play a huge role in achieving this goal in perhaps more efficient and fruitful ways.
But as social and mobile get the lion-share of attention, what about their arguably lower profile cousin, analytics?
There are various types of analytics: predictive, offline, pricing. All of these have to be used together to increase conversion.
But the type that has the biggest impact on increasing conversion is real-time analytics.
There are multiple aspects to this discipline, with "sense of urgency" analytics (while customer makes a booking or reservation) one of the most fascinating.
Gone are the days where travel websites had a "tell a Friend" feature to allow a customer to share information with his/her friends.
Now, this gap is filled with the social media widget bandwagon. But how about reversing that communication? When a customer is shopping for a product (be it flight, hotel etc), the website tells the customer what other customers are doing on THAT particular product.
Example
James logs into Tnooz-hotels.com (this doesn't exist, FYI!) to make a hotel reservation. He searches for hotels in Chicago, to begin his stay on May 20. The website lists 125 hotels. Also, the website tells James:
- 45 customers are currently viewing Hotel Holiday Inn
- 20 customers have reserved a room in the last 48 hours
- The last booking made for Holiday Inn was 6 minutes ago
- King Room is the most selling room type, only two rooms left in King Room-type
James notices all these real-time numbers and his confidence level immediately goes high and a sense of urgency is created for him to go ahead and book one of the remaining two King Rooms. He makes his decision and reserves a King Room in Holiday Inn.
[caption id="attachment_101343" align="aligncenter" width="518" caption="1. Agoda.com"]
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[caption id="attachment_101353" align="aligncenter" width="540" caption="2. Agoda.com"]
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[caption id="attachment_101354" align="aligncenter" width="561" caption="3. Booking.com"]
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[caption id="attachment_101355" align="aligncenter" width="543" caption="4. Expedia.com"]
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[caption id="attachment_101356" align="aligncenter" width="546" caption="5. Expedia.com"]
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This is not a new trend. We have noticed this feature a few years ago in a number of online travel agences (Agoda) and, more recently, in Booking.com. Then, inevitably, all major OTAs followed suit.
Creating this sense of urgency is a good strategy to increase conversion. At the same time, it should not backfire and impact on the user experience (although displaying "last booking made for this hotel was 39 days ago" is surely going to trigger a negative reaction).
But this sense of urgency is not utilized to its full potential by many top websites.
Why?