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It’s that time of year again when your friends and colleagues are talking about going on holiday but you haven’t booked anything… What is the first thing you do? Well other than despair and wonder if the UK will be hot enough this year not to go abroad (probably not), I usually get online and start looking at pictures of gorgeous lapping shores, colourful market towns, and a certain theme park in Florida – but then what, should I just go for it and book it online? What is holding me back?

According to our latest travel poll results, most people that look at holidays online are most influenced to ‘book now’ if they are being shown cheap deals. This is what we, as the consumer, have come to expect. The second thing that would help us to part with our credit card details and book that dream holiday is a review, feedback from other people.

I have to agree with the 1000+ people in the poll, these things are definitely what I look for. The ideal website would be one that might show a price comparison, because then I don’t even have to do any research elsewhere to check I was getting the cheapest deal, and then show me reassuringly honest comments so I feel a level of trust that this great deal won’t have unexpected catches once I get there.

But is that really enough? I still haven’t clicked on ‘book now’, I wonder why…

Have you booked your holiday for this year? What are the top things a travel website would need to make you book online? Leave your comments below… (Also, if anyone has any suggestions on where I should go on holiday this year it would be greatly appreciated!)

Many websites from varying sectors have some kind of geographical-based navigation, whether it’s a travel website, an estate agents’ site or even the store locator function on a retail website. The question is how to offer this functionality. Some sites offer map-based browsing, but often it’s not used heavily as it’s not easy-to-use. I’ve come across a few sites like this recently and it reminded of some previous tips I wrote for our newsletter on how to design effective map-based browsing.

Start from a high level and allow customers to drill-down

It’s important with map-based browsing to start from a high-level map view (e.g. the whole world or the whole of the UK). Users should then be given large, labelled areas to click on, such as countries, then regions, then cities, etc. During this process you must make each area a single hotspot with a mouse over effect to make it appear clickable.

Add further detail for customers who want specific places

It’s very common for travel customers to already know the specific city or region that they want to visit, or even the specific resort. To best cater for these customers you must provide an alternative way to find a destination, such as a dropdown list of the most popular destinations. In addition, you should consider adding landmarks at the most detailed map level e.g. town names or major roads to allow users to pinpoint their destination.

Remember to offer a way back

Chances are that customers will want to look at a number of destinations within a particular region. It’s no good making users start a new search every time they want to look at another destination. Instead you should give them a way to zoom out to the previous page.

British Airways might have enough problems at the moment what with making big financial losses and reports that its cabin crew have voted nine to one in favour of striking over the Christmas period. Nevertheless, I’d like to talk about a shortcoming I encountered deep within its website, specifically in the Executive Club section.British Airways plane

Firstly I feel I must insert a caveat here that I’m not knocking BA’s website as a whole, as it provides a very good user experience and actually topped Webcredible’s 2009 Flights Online Report. However, the problem I encountered came when looking to attribute BA miles to a previous flight.

When it comes to joining BA’s Executive Club and collecting miles, I’m guessing many people do it in the way I did – booked a flight, realised you could claim the miles, and signed up to collect them retrospectively – and it’s the retrospective element that I feel is slightly flawed!

Obviously if you’re a member when you book a flight, you use your frequent flyer number upon booking and the miles are added automatically when you’ve flown. When looking to add miles for previously taken flights however, I expected to see a clear link in the ‘Manage my account’ section, but that unfortunately wasn’t the case. The left-hand navigation is actually very well laid out, but it’s really not immediately clear where the required section would be.

After a good few minutes of searching I did find it in the ‘Collecting BA miles’ section, under the ‘Flights’ sub-menu, right at the bottom of the main content on the page, with the link text ‘More about claiming missing BA miles’. Now in hindsight, this does seem like a logical location, but for new users it can be very hard to find and surely should be promoted much more actively (as they are the users likely to need this facility).

I admit this is a minor point when it comes to the overall user experience of a very good website. But, when it comes to recruiting new members to its Executive Club, this point could be important for BA.

Given the partnerships between airlines to gain rewards for one airline from flights on another (I’ve accumulated most of my BA miles on Cathay Pacific flights for example), customers don’t have to join BA’s Executive Club to gain rewards on BA flights, and herein lies the point. If users have trouble claiming the miles on retrospective flights on BA’s website then they may simply head to another airline’s site and use its reward scheme instead.

Photo credit:  lrargerich via Flickr / Creative commons

In a previous post I talked about communicating with those back home while travelling and how in the 90s this relied on the solidness of postcards, letters and phone calls. The audience for these was, by necessity, rather small – family and a couple of envious best friends.

Ekit online postcardNow, my brother is on a one-year overland trip and I, along with the world, can trace his every mile thanks to his ekit.com online travel journal. From the journal I can send him a text, call him, post comments on his entries, see his current location on a zoomable Google map and find out whether his phone is on or off.

It all works through a SIM card and he can make live updates to his journal from his phone or PC all time-stamped to pins on the map. Everything is reciprocally integrated with Twitter, Facebook and his blog. The added benefit is that when I ring him it’s just the cost of a local UK mobile call and also free to him in most of the countries he’s visited so far. All useful stuff.

On the down side of this beta version, the interface and a lot of the interactions are not very user friendly. For instance, previous and back buttons face the wrong way. The interaction ‘make a call’ actually works as ‘request a call back’ so why not name the button that way. And the journal entries themselves are preceded by too much pre-bumph like ‘Paris 18 Buttes-Montmartre, France. This is in Paris, France’ spaced over two lines.

From my brother’s point of view, as a user, the sign-in doesn’t remember him and he has found some of the set-up pages unintuitive and difficult to learn.

But on the whole it’s been really useful to know where he is and read his updates and there are some nice touches like the email I get when he makes an update is an image of a postcard. With more user-centred development this could turn into a slick, dependable service. Not to mention every mother’s gap year dream.

Online travel customers are influenced by lots of different things when it comes to booking a holiday – find out how you can better reach your customers and boost sales.

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