New trip planning tool from Travelocity
October 30, 2007
Travelocity has launched their latest tool to help customers plan their perfect holiday. The latest addition (I blogged about one of their others here) to the stable of user friendly trip planning tools is the Road Trip Wizard.
The Road Trip Wizard is aimed at users seeking a way to build up a road trip itinerary online. It’s much closer to the kind of trip planning tools I’ve always thought were the next logical step for the online travel arena (more on that in a post coming soon). It’s really flexible, allows multi destination plans to be made and is a definite move away from the normal route of having to specify dates and destinations before getting any results (or even content in some cases) back from the website your querying. This is a very good thing! It’s actually fairly unintuitive for users to be asked such specifics when they first hit a website. Imagine the scenario of the travel agents, never are the first questions you’re asked ‘what date, how long, where, how many people’, it’s more likely to be ‘what kind of holiday, what kind of weather, what kind of experience’ this is where we need to get to in online.
The wizard allows you to select a starting point and then search around it for places to stay and things to do (and you can of course book them), then you can select a next point for your journey and do the same again. It will then plot a route on a map and warn you if it thinks you’re driving too far in a day etc. You can specify more details about yourself and the party, even down to the reason for the trip, and it gets even more clever based on the personas you’ve created. The intelligent engine behind the wizard scours a database of over 5 million points of interest making it extremely powerful.
At the end of it all you have a very detailed plan of where to stay, what to do and the driving directions to get you from point to point.
The Road Trip Wizard is a piece of technology created by a company called LeisureLogix, Travelocity is the first to launch an application using the platform. There are obvious aplications for UK tour operators as well, it could quite nicely be applied to the (currently very popular) flydrive holidays that are often sold to the east and west coast U.S. This would allow a UK tour operator to sell a flight into Orlando for instance and then allow a user to book a car and a range of hotels across the country, flying back via a west coast airport such as San Francisco. Integrating this technology with a dynamic packaging engine would be incredibly powerful! I’d also like to see it ported over to cover South Africa as well, it would be a great way to plan a Garden Route road trip. Tools like this are a definite step in the right direction for online travel.
Want to know what web designers think?
October 17, 2007
Well now you can find out!
Those lovely people at A List Apart have surveyed 33,000 people who make websites and made the results public.
Here’s the link to the PDF, makes for really interesting reading (once you get past the demographic data).
Most interesting fact for me was that 77% of respondents say they keep their skills current through trial and error. Perhaps the industry needs to take a long hard look at providing more development opportunities for their employees?
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!
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!!
10 steps to best practice in online campaign development
July 20, 2007
Here’s some really useful tips from IPA Digital and ISBA:
- Briefing all agencies together and strategy agreed upfront
A common mistake in digital campaigns is running off and not involving the offline agencies from the start. Any good digital agency should want to meet with your offline, so if they don’t mention it be aware. Integration with the offline customer experience is key to getting the most value out of your campaign. - Discuss budgets accurately and allow for contingencies
Get your budget as accurate as you can, set a scope for the project and don’t allow that to slip (too much) leave a contingency pot as well just in case. All this saves for the headaches associated with bad budgeting and having to go cap in hand to your board asking for more money. - A single point of approval works best
Especially where agencies are involved! Don’t confuse them, keep communications straight forward and don’t get too many people involved, it will only make things more difficult. - Timings and planning: plan early
Get your plans on paper as soon as you can, they don’t have to be set in stone, they can flex but it will give you a good grounding to have your project based on. - Design & development: stretch yourselves
Let your agency push you. Take risks that they advise (they will usually have evidence to back up why you should), digital marketing is not something to be scared of. Use it to it’s full potential, don’t rein it in! - Measure only what matters
Decide what is to be measured early in the planning stages. Set some key KPI and track them. Decide what is really important to you and use them as your key measurements. - Trafficking and campaign launch: plan for QA testing
Leave room in the plan for QA. All advertising collateral should go through a rigorous quality assurance phase to ensure compatibility, accessibility and accuracy. - Produce back-up inventory
If a campaign slips it’s a real pain to suddenly have to quickly produce some assets to fill the advertising slot you have booked. Have some standard format brand heavy assets you can fall back on just in case! - Optimisation, reporting and updates: monitor your campaign in the wild
Once it’s live don’t think thats the end of it! You can change, optimise, amend and make sure it’s performing to it’s peak potential! - Learn from analysis of results: test and refine
Use your analysis to improve next time, everyone should still be able to learn something new from every campaign you run, even the most seasoned creative or account director.
All excellent points, and ones that should be adhered to in any digital projects life cycle! Read the full report here.
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!
