Teletext Holidays chairman Steve Endacott explains how the need for speed in an increasingly mobile world is leading to the emergence of a two-stage online booking journey and what this means for user experience, data protection and payments
For most online players mobile represents more than 50% of their traffic but has a much lower conversion than its desktop cousin.
It’s no surprise therefore, that a ‘mobile first’ approach has become the key focus for most OTA’s with literally thousands of A/B tests constantly being applied to try to find the ultimate ‘user interface’ (UX) for mobile sites.
The original focus of the industry was on responsive sites that optimised the desktop journey to represent it better on mobile devices.
Quickly, the UX guys realised that the friction points on hand-held devices due to ‘big finger clumsiness’ required different solutions to mouse-driven desktop interfaces.
However, the real impact of mobile is the shorter but more frequent sessions during which devices are used and the emergence of what the marketers call ‘mobile moments’. This means that the mobile journey must be much faster and, to achieve this, simpler.
The latest movement in UX is focusing on removing friction in the booking journey.
In laymen’s terms, this means understanding the users’ intent and ensuring that the experience provided is exactly what the user wanted and providing clear actions.
In some respects this could be perceived as dumbing down the booking journey by removing any possible distractions.
Just have a look at how different the Booking.com desktop and mobile sites are. On the mobile site, filters are hidden and once a customer is in the booking funnel, any distraction from the key goal of booking a hotel has been removed.
The result is that ancillary sales such as car hire, transfers and insurance, are being shunted to post-booking pitches via email or clever remarketing, using cookies that allow highly targeted post-booking advertising of ancillaries.
