March 27 2007

ATG offers advice for travel sites

According to research organisation Forrester, the British spend more on travel websites than any other e-commerce sites, with over a third of all money spent online going on flights and holidays. Jaap Favier, research director of consumer markets at Forrester has predicted that spending on travel websites will continue to increase by around 133 per cent over the next five years. With such an increase in demand, will travel websites be able to cope? Ian Davis, director of OnDemand at ATG gives online travel sites some advice (and it's just as relevant for other retail sectors).

The ever rising popularity of consumers shopping online has had massive implications for the travel industry. With more and more people booking travel and holidays online, great importance must be placed on creating robust, easy to use and highly personalised sites that can handle the increasing amounts of traffic and competition.

Up-sell and Cross-sell. With the help of personalisation, online travel vendors should present travellers with additional buying options as they plan their trips - offering car hire, hotel rooms or excursions relevant to them based on a customer profile that is updated in real-time, as the customer searches the site. For example, a shopper may book a holiday to India and then click to log out of the site. At this point a pop-up could appear offering a discounted excursion to the Taj Mahal, helping the retailer to effectively up-sell.

Robustness. Travel websites must be robust enough to cope with large amounts of traffic, especially during peak seasons such as Easter, when the number of consumers booking online will soar. Sites also need to factor in scalability to handle increasing amounts of bookings, as online travel becomes even more popular over the next five years.

Shopping Cart Abandonment All too often shoppers choose a flight or hotel they want, but then abandon their selection prior to the actual purchase. Decreasing your shopping cart abandonment rates is a matter of understanding what drives shoppers to make their choices in the first place, and ensuring the sale is closed. Travel sites can do this by alerting buyers to full costs early in the process. For example, many consumers click through several pages to choose flights they want before abandoning the purchase at the point when airport and further taxes are added to the price. Sites should also make it easy to edit orders, for instance allowing travellers to be flexible with dates and times throughout the booking process.