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Next to my own experience with developing booking tools for travel companies in the past, I have been the user of many different online booking tools in the past couple of days.... an interesting yet frustrating experience. Perhaps I am too much a power user, perhaps I expect too much, perhaps I am unrealistic (especially in times with probably little room for investments), but I think the conversion (look to book ratio) can be so much better if the airlines target their customers right and adapt the booking tool and services to this target group. "One size fits all" creates overly complex, extremely feature rich, non-intuitive tools.
Underneath the first part of a series of 3 articles online booking tools: Customer orientedness, Complexity of the process, User interface pet peeves I have not filled the stories with a lot of examples, because that would point out a single site on a single website, while building a booking tool is always a trade-off. Even more I'd rather get a list of the positive exceptions in the comments of this series. There are very few figures on why online bookers stop the process before making the actual booking. My guess it has to do with the user experience or with a different intent for using it (price comparisons or just orientation). But I don't remember ever having been asked why I don't book upon leaving a certain website, so I wonder how much interest there is to know the true reason. PART 1/3: Customer orientedness?
It looks like most booking tools have not been designed with the customers in mind. Although there are many "interaction experts" involved in developing booking tools, everyone seems to forget that most people are not flying for flying sake, but because they need to go from somewhere to somewhere. In both cases, the "somewhere" is not an airport. To make things worse, most people in western europe and the US have multiple airfields at driving distance. As the destination is in many cases unknown, there might not be very much clues about where exactly you have to be and how far that is from any airport. It is a pity that EVERY booking website requires to enter a departure AIRPORT and an arrival AIRPORT. Sometimes smarter searching can be done because of the names of big cities in the destination name. But I am left with the feeling that the website does not care about where I am coming from, and where I am going to. It just cares about the segment that I fly and pay for..... where is the consumer oriented approach? Next to that, most travellers book a journey for a specific reason: to do something (useful) while they are at their destination. From the booking tools you get the impression that your most important job is to wait for the flight back. No discovery is attempted to find out what you are going to do there (business, leisure, festival, event), until what time you need to be there, and to tailor the offering towards such answers. Perhaps the current trends of offering ancillary services is going to improve this, but I have seen little change in the main booking part. Traveltelligence: know thy travel options Probably this is still a left-over from the old GDS (global distribution systems) days, which had termin that were operated by travel agents who had all the intelligence and experience to choose the right departure and destination for you. Online web applications enable that ordinary people can now book online, but the trouble is, some (or a lot, depending on what you want) travel intelligence is still needed. Seasoned business travellers told me that it took them a couple of years before they understood the systems and perks in international travel: For example to fly indirect to pay the same for business class as an economy ticket on a direct flight. Or to not transit (switch aircraft) in the US because you need to re-check in your luggage, etc etc. The nice thing would be to have this knowledge built in tools that make our life more easy, not more complex. Please feel free to comment underneath. Sequel: Part 2 : complexity of the process. |
