Online travel is growing exponentially, approx 40% of UK travel consumers are expected to book at least one part of their holiday next year online. All the players are expanding their online activities to try to meet this demand but the ones who are really innovating will (in my opinion) be the winners.
Currently, the innovation (and by that I mean really useful innovation) is coming from some of the price comparison / fare aggregator websites.
I’ll start with Kayak; they’ve added a really nice and simple piece of functionality which adds a lot of value to the consumer. Their ‘weekend search’ allows users to compare air fares for the weekend periods across a month instead of having to specify exactly which dates they want. This is a real bonus for those of us who like to get away for weekend breaks quite often. Simple functions like this can dramatically improve conversion rates as users find websites more accommodating to their needs, and of course you can still get your results in a multitude of displays (list, matrix, map, price trend graph etc). See the image below showing the results from a search for November weekend availability, they quickly show users what is the cheapest weekend to travel.
Next comes Farecast; they’ve added functionality to their hotels search to enable users to pick out whats a good deal and whats not. Hotels are now colour coded depending on whether Farecast considers them a good deal. It’s only available on certain destinations and hotels at the moment but they promise to expand their coverage quite quickly. It’s a big step forward if you’re a price sensitive online shopper (as most travellers are). Example of the map based results below:
Lastly comes SideStep; another aggregator of airfares and hotel availability. FareTracker is their latest offering which has just come out in Beta. It allows users to track a flight route to see how the fare has moved over time. It leverages the millions of searches that are happening on SideStep to find the lowest fares for any combination of flight plans with the greatest degree of date flexibility in the market today: +/- 7 days from a specified date. In addition to monitoring price, users can select to recieve weekly email updates or updates as the prices change, receive an email notification if the price reaches a specified price point (a trigger to buy) and track historical fare pricing for the route chosen. It all mounts up to a serious piece of functionality, although incredibly similar in premise to Travelemails.com. Again, here’s a screenshot:
This kind of innovation knocks spots off the offerings from traditional travel operators such as tour operators. Even some of the other, sometimes better known, price comparison sites (Travel Supermarket, Kelkoo etc) struggle to offer anything innovative like this.
A time will come when tour operators and the likes either have to catch up quick or get their product included in these aggregators and start to pay commissions like an affiliate scheme.
5000 web apps in the blink of an eye
August 29, 2007
All your favourite web 2.0 apps flashing before your eyes… Like saucepan sets.
Jakob Nielsen on banner blindness
August 20, 2007
Really good insight as ever from usability expert Jakob Nielsen here. In this article he discusses whats known as banner blindness, the fact that users are often oblivious to the presence of banner adverts on the web. The study he’s undertaken involved eyetracking and the results are pretty conclusive.
The findings show that designing banner ads which supposedly stand out as they are different colours and using borders is actually a false economy and you are better off integrating your advertising into a websites content. Users tend to avoid focusing on objects that look very different from the site design, often hardly glancing at them and rarely clicking. Google are an example of someone who’s got this just right in their implementation of Adwords. As everyone knows, one of the main reasons Adwords works so well is that users rarely identify them as any different to a natural search result.
It’s something I’ve always suspected as users always respond better to cohesive designs where all the elements of a website hang together and complement each other. We recently redesigned our homepage and one of the elements was a promo banner displaying a ‘book online and save’ message. In the new design this is just a textual message on the screen as opposed to a bordered banner, and traffic to that page has doubled since the design changed!
The next internet is coming from Japan
August 20, 2007
So, Japan are planning on the next version of the internet already. Here’s the details from New Launches:
Japanese communications minister Yoshihide Suga said Friday that Japan will start research and development on technology for a new generation of network that would replace the Internet, eyeing bringing the technology into commercial use in 2020. Speaking to reporters in Brazil, where he is visiting, Suga said an organization will be set up as early as this fall with cooperation from businesses, academia and government offices for promoting the technology when the Internet is seen to be faced with increasing constraints in achieving higher throughputs of data as well as ensuring data security. The envisaged network is expected to ensure faster and more reliable data transmission, and have more resilience against computer virus attacks and breakdowns. The ministry is hoping Japan will take a lead in development of post-Internet technology and setting global standards, a move that ministry officials believe would help make Japanese companies competitive in the global market for hardware and software using such technology.
What does it take to turn lookers into bookers?
July 30, 2007
In the world of online travel conversion rates are king! Turning those that are just looking at your website into people who want to book is the holy grail and what everyone in the industry is striving for.
Interestingly, someone has done some of the work for us (which is always nice)! A company called YPartnership have a publication that comes out annually looking at the travel industry. The latest issue has surveyed travel consumers to ask them what they look for on a travel website. Consumers are clearly most interested in the ability to check the lowest available fares and rates. That’s not to suggest web site content is unimportant. Rather, it’s just not as important as the ability to satisfy consumers’ determination to get a good deal!
Here’s the summary list below showing what percentage of consumers surveyed said was most important to them on an online travel website:
| Desirability Of Travel Web Site Features
|
2007
% |
| Extremely/Very Desirable: | |
| Being able to check the lowest available fares/rates |
90
|
| Having an easy-to-use booking feature |
81
|
| Photos of the hotel and resort facilities, rooms, etc. |
71
|
| Destination maps that illustrate area activities, dining, shops, attractions, etc. |
69
|
| The option of scheduling and confirming vacation activities in advance of arrival |
66
|
| The ability to preview room locations |
63
|
| The ability to check last minute air, hotel and car rental availability |
63
|
| Photos of the area |
61
|
| Virtual video tours of the hotel and resort facilities |
55
|
| Live counselors to handle questions over the phone who can instantly send information for me to look at on my computer |
50
|
| E-mail notifications of travel specials and discounts when they become available |
50
|
| Being able to download and print promotional literature and brochures from the site |
44
|
| A web site that remembers my personal preferences |
43
|
| Virtual video tours of the area |
42
|
| Bulletin boards for questions and advice from others who have traveled there |
35
|
| The ability to share photographs and personal accounts of travel experiences |
16
|
Internet usage around the world
July 30, 2007
Ever wondered how deep the internet is penetrating into countries around the world? CNN has a nice interactive map where you can roll over areas of the world and find out what percentage of people are using the web.
Well worth a look!
All online data lost after the great web crash of 2007!
July 23, 2007
The Onion does it again. Pure genius!!
DVLA bigger online than Tesco.com
July 19, 2007
Now everyone in e-commerce knows that Tesco.com is one of the biggest UK internet retailers and therefore one of the biggest e-commerce sites in the land. Tesco have been hugely successful in their ventures online and it’s easy to see why if you have ever used their home shopping website (great usability).
News has come out however that the DVLA (Driver Vehicle Licensing Agency) is actually a bigger online player now! They recently put the ability to renew your tax disc online and it’s getting huge usage.
On the DVLA site 273,500 motorists buy their tax discs electronically every week with £4.2m generated every day, compared with 250,000 weekly online orders to Tesco generating £3.6m per day. On the busiest day in March 2007, £9.9m was generated in tax paid online, and to date, 12.5 million of 33 million UK vehicles have been taxed online.
Of course the main reason for this is convenience, not having to queue at the Post Office is the reason I use it and to have it delivered to your door is so easy.
Kudos to the DVLA for being a government department who’ve built a service that gets used and people understand!
Don’t visit Google websites for two years!!
July 17, 2007
In a token gesture to privacy advocates, Google have announced that they will auto-delete their cookies if a user doesn’t visit a Google website within two years.
Google cookies were set to delete after the year 2039 previously.
I find this quite funny! This means users need to abstain from Googling or visiting Google websites for two whole years! I don’t know anyone who could go two years without visiting a Google web property, or anyone who would want to.
Perhaps this should be set up as some kind of a challenge. Let’s see who can manage two years without visiting a Google site and then we can see if their cookies really will delete or not! Otherwise, how will we ever know if this really is going to happen 
First person to reply to his post in two years will win a prize (not sure what yet)…
Old skool internet
July 16, 2007
This is brilliant! If, like me, you worked in the online world in the old days then you’ll probably recall the days when websites looked like this and there were no decent search engines.
The rate of progress is astounding when you think it was like this 13 years ago!!
