Online Travel Booking: What influences Consumers?

Source: Webcredible, 4 October 2008 

Submitted by Alexander Baxevanis

For today's time-poor consumers, booking a holiday can be a tough process. The age old question always fired at a new band, 'What are your influences?' is just as important when it comes to online travel customers.

RESEARCH ASSISTANCE
Most people begin the holiday research process by searching for destination guides (typically through Google). Often, these in-depth guides either don't exist, or consumers don't realise that they exist, on major travel booking sites. By not offering this extra level of information, travel sites risk people leaving and finding this information elsewhere. Researching and booking a holiday is a very time-consuming process and competes with other work and household activities. People have limited time during lunch break and evenings, meaning they're likely to get frustrated if it takes to long too find the information that they require.

WORD OF MOUTH AND REVIEWS
Recommendations from friends and family are an important source of information, as almost all consumers take these into account when booking. Travel providers could facilitate these types of recommendations by offering 'email a friend' buttons. This will make it easier for users to recommend and communicate the details of their holiday. Inevitably, user-generated content is also an important factor when it comes to online research and booking. Allow negative reviews and provide assurances that the reviews are written by actual holiday bookers.

SPECIFIC CONSUMER CHALLENGES
Groups of friends holidaying together often disagree on destinations, and communication within the group can be poor. Travel websites could potentially link travel planning with social networking websites to enable these groups to better communicate. In contrast to this, the main concern of those travelling with children is making sure the holiday is child-friendly. Travel sites should make sure that information about child-friendly holidays and activities is easily accessible.

SELL, SELL, SELL
There is a large, currently untapped, opportunity for travel sites to follow the lead of ecommerce sites and cross-sell travel-related products and services as part of the booking process. This could include clothes, accessories, cosmetics and weight loss products and services. 

OTHER RECOMMENDATIONS
It's important for travel companies to do as much as they can to help users choose their holiday. Other ideas that could be implemented to this end include:
* Letting users create shortlists with different flight and hotel options, that can be accessed when visiting the site at a later time 
* Providing 'a real breakdown' of prices to include all extras 
* Allowing those booking group holidays to pay for their share of the booking directly to the booking site 
* Aggregating and organising all trip information before and after booking (Tripit and Traveldk partly do this) 
* Cross-selling relevant products and services after users have booked a holiday 
* Integrating destination guides with booking sites so people can complete most of their research and booking tasks on the same site 

What's ultimately at stake here is providing sufficient information to help influence travel decision. Whether this is an objective online destination guide or a suggested excursion complete with a review from a previous customer, the smallest gestures can make a huge difference.

Case study: The importance of the Google mindset

Expedia's got no reservations on hotel analytics

Tags: business analytics, sas

   

By Jo Best

Published: 31 October 2008 13:04 GMT

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When it comes to online hotel shopping, there can be such a thing as too much choice, web travel company Expedia has found.

Given a choice between slicing and dicing search results to find the perfect hotel or just trusting the judgement of an online travel agent, most consumers will pick the latter, according to Dan Lynn, Expedia's director of strategy and customer insights.

Despite offering consumers the choice to narrow down potential hotel picks by price, star rating, distance and a number of other factors, most consumers are likely to pick a hotel from the first five results Expedia returns for their stay - a trend Lynn attributes to consumers reliance on search engines.

"One of our key challenges is inventory selection optimisation… The vast majority of consumers don't use functions [like sorting hotels by price or star rating] - they use the search results. It's critically important we put the best hotels for any query in the first few places," Lynn said, speaking at the SAS Premier Business Leadership Series event in Las Vegas.

The company has been using analytics to work out what attributes can turn a search into a sale.

"By looking at the data, running it through SAS and giving it to some great statisticians… we can figure out what the most important characteristics of a hotel or piece of inventory can increase the likelihood of that piece of inventory converting," he said.

"We can't get everything - we can't work out how the human brain works but…we can predict with 70 per cent accuracy what a consumer is going to select from a choice of hotels based on certain attributes.

"By taking each of these attributes and using SAS to build a choice model, we can score every hotel room we have and show which is most likely to sell to consumers," Lynn added.

But it's not just a question of tailoring those crucial first few search results to suit the customers needs, Expedia is also looking at optimising its site for a better effect on its bottom line - potentially by promoting hotels offering the best margin or simply better quality establishments to avoid a bad holiday for the consumer and encourage them to make a return visit to the site.

Another potential addition to the Expedia analytics armoury is behavioural analysis based on a customer's life stage - but the company says for travel, past purchases aren't always a good guide to future shopping.

Instead, Expedia is planning to work around clustering.

"What we want to do next is cluster modelling - cluster consumers into certain segments and then weight the importance of different attributes differently," Lynn said.