We’re committed to helping hoteliers drive direct bookings on their websites. There’s nothing we like more than speaking to our clients about what’s working well and what we could build next to make their lives easier. But there’s another group of people we’re just as focussed on – your guests.
There’s no point building an endless range of different sizes, shapes and colours of message to please clients if those messages are ruining the booking experience for their website visitors. There’s also no point wasting our engineers’ time building the kinds of widgets that guests don’t even notice, when they could be focusing their energy on new tools that will genuinely increase revenue for hotels.
Watching and learning from how guests interact
Our product design team runs regular user testing workshops where they observe how real guests actually book hotels online. Our latest round of testing focussed on all kinds of website messages – not just the ones we build here at Triptease but also those of our competitors. With more and more providers of website conversion tools entering the market, we wanted to understand which messages really worked and which were purely cosmetic with no real impact on the guest journey at all.
We asked participants to do three tasks:
- Review four hotel websites featuring different types of messages (Full Screen messages, Notifications, Review Widgets, Live Chat, Nudge Messages and Price Comparison messages). Some were built by Triptease and some by other website messaging providers. The participants were not told that we were looking to see how they interacted with these specific products – they were simply asked to make a booking and review their overall experience. They also knew nothing about Triptease, our specific products or our goals.
- Rank notification message categories in order of preference (Bookers, Viewers, Searchers, Availability, Location, Guest reviews, Pricing and Direct booking benefits)
- Review some different notification layouts and designs
Here’s what we learned:
