Travel for 2006 : Part One

Published 2 years, 8 months ago by Rob Abbott

One of my new year’s resolutions is to blog at least 3 times a month, so here’s a fresh one.

I am spending the new year in Florida visiting with family and as busy as I am with my work I tend to get behind in my travel arrangements. This past trip my girlfriend and I both searched through about 8-10 discount travel sites to find cheap tickets (ended up buying Delta tickets on Orbitz) and 4 different sites for lodging (rough search with no vacancies in St. Pete Beach for the New Year). My solution for lodging came via Yahoo Maps, which I will go into more later.

The params for our flight were…

Travel dates: Less than two weeks (1-2 days before New Years and 1-2 days following)
Budget: Less than $1000
Departure City: Within 40 miles of San Jose
Arrival City: Tampa Bay
Flight preference: 1 connection maximum
Flight Needs: 2 adults, Seats must be together

We started off looking at the regular sites (Priceline, Travelocity & JetBlue…we really like JetBlue’s interface and flow, not to mention the airline overall) and we found flights but the prices left a lot to be desired. I noticed that after going to all of the sites we visited we were chasing the idea that if we could just find the best site with right combination we would find the price that fit our budget (as a consumer it makes the most sense, right?). While that idea partially faded when I completed the checkout at Orbitz for $843.78, I realized we had also spent more than 1 hour looking for tickets.

That is an inefficient use of our time and amazingly we both are in the field of making site flows faster and more efficient, we blaze through information, but it’s very easy for me to assume that an average consumer would search about 1-2 travel sites and easily spend more then 30min to an hour pricing and buying tickets in the flows available. I would also assume that the average consumer probably would spend $100-450 more on the same type of purchase. I have a lot of patience and did not give in to the majority of prices we were prompted to chose from. Even though we were buying tickets late I still knew there was a decent price for us that was within our budget.

It came down to a few adjustments that had we explored initially would of saved us time.

1 site that covered all of the possible prices available on the web
1 flow that revealed flexible pricing based around travel dates & times, departure & destination cities and multiple carrier bookings

While most sites you’ll find offer most of these options it comes down to how the information is conveyed and the experience (was I prompted for the right criteria, how relevant were the results, how broad was the search and most importantly how significant was the initial discount?).

I spent 95% of the time in two flows, 15% spent entering criteria (over and over again) and 80% spent on modifying the criteria for different combinations to find the best result at the right price. The remainder 5% was spent in the purchase flow.

If entering the criteria was easily shared so it would only have to be entered only once, it would of saved us time. That is a quick win. At this point the biggest hurdle for sites today is displaying the information correctly and simplifying the results pages. There is just too much information being thrown on the page (irrelevant discounts, cross-promotional ads, detailed flight info that could be displayed later in the flow). I love high resolutions but if you can’t get me to buy an airline ticket within an 800×600 box then the flow needs to stripped down.

Too much service on the page is just too much service, it is confusing for all users.

That’s a key problem for any service orgnization on the web, too many hands in the mix makes a bad mix.

Today sites are carved up into real estate internally and owned by business units that do not communicate with one another, which are then driven by internal pressure and external competition. These issues are very common and can be easily recognized on almost every major site. Some of the answers in the past to declining business traffic comes from the disorganization and relevance of items on a single page. One purpose, one function, one page should be the goal; just look at any simple purchase flow.

Top in my book are…

Orbitz.com is definitely above average. I found that most of our needs were met and the results relevance and initial discount was high. The last two bullet points I listed in this post represented Orbitz. If Orbitz was “Orbitz-Lite” I would not venture anywhere else.

JetBlue.com is a great airline site. Their prices are competitive and unusually high in some cases. The interface is simple and the flow is painless, but it lacks some of the Orbitz result set features.

The sites we viewed…