IN-DEPTH: A marketer’s goal should be able to understand their market segments and be able to anticipate their shopping behaviour in order to capitalise by meeting their needs.

By Ritesh Gupta

Most PC web travel bookers today are savvy, know their options, and want to get their results quickly.

The online travel industry is rapidly evolving with the demands of today’s travellers. Content is available through a variety of sources including third party travel sites, review sites, social media sites and destination pages. Travel marketers should expect that when potential guests visit their website, they may be landing on various pages based on their searches and are often coming loaded with information from other sites.

For this reason, hospitality websites today should engage consumers at every level.

In a market where travel buyers are becoming more price constrained and picky in their choice of supplier, travel retailers simply can’t afford to be losing sales to basic mistakes. The issue is that the journey a customer takes towards a purchase is getting ever more complicated.

Loading time

Experts recommend that a website page shouldn’t take more than 2 to 3 seconds to load, or its content quickly becomes irrelevant when the load time causes a search to move away from its pages.

“Users want dynamic, content-rich pages with various features to load in 2-3 seconds. A marketer’s goal should be able to understand their market segments and be able to anticipate their shopping behaviour in order to capitalise by meeting their needs. Multivariate tests can help do this. Values can be assigned on every website interaction (including videos, sharing, page clicks, etc), giving marketers the ability to track engagement at the finest level and determine their content based on measurable results,” Amanda See, Regional Director for Sabre Hospitality Solutions/cite> told EyeforTravel in an interview.

There are a lot of on-site factors that lead to a high performance website.

“Download time is a huge factor for ranking a site. YSlow & Page Speed are tools developed by Google and Yahoo to measure download time and site performance,” Jaydev Mandaliya, Technical Support Lead, Milestone Internet Marketing recently wrote in a posting on the company’s blog.

Mandaliya recommended few tips to reduce a site’s download time:

• Make the website’s structure simple and easy to navigate. Do not create complex structures and navigation where visitors can get lost and leave a website.
• Content should be clean and well formatted on the page. While updating the back-end of a website, do not copy and paste content directly from a word document. Instead, use notepad to remove any formatting issues. Also, make sure that content is unique and fresh. Search engines flag pages that have duplicate content; therefore, it is important not to use any duplicate content for the site.
• A flashy layout can downgrades the site performance. Layouts should be lightweight. Do not use flash for animation. Use the latest HTML technology and create a simple and smooth layout. Giant companies always go with a simple but readable attractive layout like Google, Apple, MSN, Yahoo etc…
• Images are the second major elements that increase page weight. Use optimised images for your website. Do not use very large-sized images as it slows the site speed.
• Avoid unknown third party widgets. If necessary, only install well-known widgets on the site. Do not use multiple widgets on the page as this can slow down the page load time.

Adverse Impact

Online travel retailers are losing more than £2 billion a year as a result of simple website inefficiencies, according to recent research from website optimisation technology specialist, QuBit.

The research analysed feedback data from nearly 8,000 online travel buyers and found that errors in areas such as pricing, user experience and product were directly contributing to lost travel sales.

The top 10 reasons for lost travel purchases online were:

1. Price – The search for lower prices was a constant theme, underlining the need for the best presentation of all pricing options. Meanwhile, feedback was also focused on disparities between advertised prices and those found on the site themselves.

2. Site functionality – Access to time saving functionality was an important consideration, whether this be features such as records of saved searches or previous bookings.

3. On-site search – Site search for travel companies needs to be able to cope with a broad range of uses, from the first time visitor researching destinations through to a converting buyer looking for specific deals. Search functionality needs to be presented accordingly.

4. Product description – Information about travel products, including text, photos, videos and reviews, is vital in the purchase process and so ensuring it is adequate and well displayed is vital to retail success.

5. Additional charges – Whilst EU law dictates that prices must now be displayed with all additional costs included, the presentation of these costs is still a consideration for many consumers and optional extra charges should be set in line with competitors.

6. Navigation – Complaints around navigation focused on a lack of basic sorting and filtering functionality, enabling consumers to home in on the holiday of their preference quickly and easily.

7. Discounts/sales – In this economic climate consumers are more focused than ever on securing the best price for a holiday. Last minute offers or dedicated bargain sections were sought by buyers, along with loyalty rewards for regular customers.

8. Errors and bugs – Site errors not only cause short term frustration, they can permanently damage a site’s reputation with buyers. Simple issues such as browser compatibility can completely exclude some buyers from a site.

9. Speed – The slow loading of pages, and particularly of search results, was a major irritant for travel buyers. Given that most buyers will be looking at multiple sites, a slow loading page can be a significant disincentive to purchase.

10. Availability - Users become frustrated having invested the time into searching for products only to find that these are not available to purchase. Sites need to ensure that unavailable products are flagged as such at an early stage.

Improvement

See mentioned that traditional sites followed a more step-by-step model whereby a visitor arrived at the home page and is led to the booking process, with informational pages and photos in between.

“However, as hotel Web development has evolved we have seen that few hotels are specifically tailored to only one market segment, so why should their sites be?” pointed out Amanda. “We suggest to hotels that they implement “Smart” websites – sites that know the market segment they are speaking to based on the way the visitor has arrived to the site, and provide content tailored to that specific market segment.”

Smart sites allow hotels to personalise content – including navigation elements, images, and user generated content - to the visitor looking to plan an event, book a romantic spa getaway, or visit the property on business, while satisfying the shopper’s needs quickly and bring them closer to purchasing.

According to See, page optimisation improvements recommendations include methods such as a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) sprite technique of combining graphics when possible which reduces the number of HTTP requests.

Flash files also need to be properly optimised to minimise file size while maintaining optimal quality. There are also server-side technologies such as GZIP compression and combining scripts and any other text files to enhance load speed.

Finally, an overall reduction in the amount of HTML tag markup generated will aid in preventing excessive load times.