A few weeks ago we invited users to participate in a small study on Google Hotel Finder usability.
NB: This is a viewpoint from Nicholas Ward, president at Koddi.
We gave the users - each from the US, new to Google Hotel Finder, average and greater income, and wilth intermediate internet experience - a basic research and booking task.
We recorded their usage and then conducted brief interviews, analyzing the video and responses over the course of a few days.
Stepping back and watching how users interacted with Hotel Finder and with Hotel Price Ads was extremely insightful, and our initial analysis focused on what marketers could learn and apply to their campaigns.
In our second pass, we focused more on the opportunities for Google to improve on the experience for users.
The payoff for advertisers
Google has at least one advantage on the competition in capturing non-branded hotel searches; most users start their research there even if they are only using search as navigation.
Due to this, Google doesn’t have to build an incredibly compelling user experience to build a successful Hotel Finder product.
But there’s a reason to get this stuff right. Compare Hotel Finder to Google Shopping for a moment: when the Shopping product was extremely basic, it won users, albeit slowly.
Then when new features came out (expanded ad units, advanced advertiser functionality, review integration, and richer visual search technology among others) it went from interesting and important to absolutely critical to retailers within a year.
Getting the experience right and tying it to the right entrance paths was a source of huge growth both for Google and retail advertisers.
What will it take for Hotel Finder to follow a similar path?
Provide budgeting tools and/or show total price
We know that the leading reason that users select a site to book a hotel on is the price*, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that users want tools to be able to budget for their trip.
Yet, most meta search sites don’t actually expose the total price for a stay, even though they have all the data to do so. (In fact, of a quick check of some top sites, only Kayak jumped out as having this feature, and only when mousing over the nightly price in the search results.
I’d guess this is more about click-through rate than capability.)
The users that we recorded mentioned that this was a lacking feature, and most of them went to system tools to estimate the nightly price they could afford.
One user even left the site and went to an OTA to determine the full price of the trip with taxes and fees! Not giving users the budgeting tools they need is bad for users and could be bad for advertisers as well.
Better expose hotels near attractions
Hotel Finder did extremely well in a number of usability tasks, but really fell short when we asked users to find a hotel near landmarks like aquariums.
Perhaps surprising because Google Maps is usually so good at this kind of thing, users actually kept remarking that they must be doing something wrong. Every user moused over the "Location" filter and spent some time trying to figure out how to use that to narrow down to an attraction.
This was another example where users actually left the Hotel Finder experience to go use another site to get the information they needed. In the context of our study they came back and continued their research, but one has to wonder if they would do the same in the real world.
Increase review quantity and quality
Though things have massively improved here in the last couple years, Google still has a review sparsity problem.
Take a recent search for hotels in Dallas, Texas: across the top 10 results in Dallas, TripAdvisor had on average over six times more reviews than showed up in Hotel Finder. In this set, there was no case where Google had more reviews than TripAdvisor.
Quality is also an issue. The average Google review is only a couple of lines, and it’s no longer structured at all. Google automatically pulls some keyword content out of reviews and the results are usually unhelpful at best.
Comparatively, TripAdvisor reviews are structured and complete. Users have the ability to vote on reviews that are helpful, and easily ask further questions.
While Google is not and probably should not try to be TripAdvisor, this is an important quality signal to users.
We observed users actually make up their mind, then leave the Hotel Finder experience to double check reviews only to return to their search with some doubt when there was a major discrepancy between the Google community rating and that of another trusted source.
The case for betting on Hotel Finder
While Google is definitely missing some opportunities to win users for the long term now, it is worth pointing out that the the product is improving incrementally at a fairly rapid pace.
In the short time since our initial user study, Hotel Finder is dealing much better with attraction searches than it previously was. It used to be that searching for an attraction in the location search box yielded all kinds of unhandled errors.
Today, it’s actually pretty smooth in that attraction suggestions are supported and return accurate results with the attraction pinpointed clearly the map. This was part of a recent UI refresh that also improved look, feel, and performance.
Another recent addition is the price chart in the hotel details page and expanded messaging when a hotel is a comparatively good deal. The price chart started as a very limited experiment and appears to have been rolled out to a wider audience.
If Google continues to make incremental improvements to the user experience with the right tools and features and improves the quantity and quality of reviews, it could be a short path to a surge in traffic that makes Hotel Finder a large contributor to online bookings.
When Google decided to boost Google Shopping traffic, well positioned retailers saw year over year revenue growth of 100-300%, and I’m inclined to think hoteliers could see the same with Hotel Finder in the coming year.
NB: This is a viewpoint from Nicholas Ward, president at Koddi.