How to improve your travel website conversion

The average travel website conversion rate sits at 1-2.5%, meaning that over 97% of customers visit travel websites and fail to book. But, successful travel websites have conversion rates much higher than this.

Do you want to know their secret? They truly understand the journey that customers go on when purchasing travel, and use this understanding to help customers to find their perfect trip.

Travel is an important and complex purchase. On average, customers spend around £3000-£4000 a year on holidays & the average person goes abroad twice a year.  The average customer visits between 120-160 sites before they buy.  Customers have so many decisions to make. Where do they want to go? What type of trip do they want to go on? When?

To make it more challenging, customers typically aren’t just making this decision for themselves. They also need to take into consideration what their friends, partners or family want to do. It’s no wonder it takes around 19 days of research to book a trip. 

With travel being a significant outgoing, and a rare and special purchase, the customers’ experience needs to be perfect.

Along each step of the journey, customers are looking for inspiration, reassurance and help in making decisions.

By understanding what your customers need, you can boost your travel website conversion.

There are five key areas where you can help customers and grow travel website conversion rates:

1. Help customers as they move through the research phase
2. Acknowledge that each customer has different needs and cater for these
3. Help customers understand which products they should buy
4. Help customers understand why they should book through your website
5. Remove friction and make it as easy as possible for customers to make a booking

Help customers as they move through the research phase.

A lot of customers start their research without knowing the specifics of their trip. They are often looking for:

• Inspiration on destinations and trip types
• Best times to travel
• An idea on price points
• Whether they should plan the trip themselves or book a self-organised one

Before they can even seriously consider making a purchase.

You can improve your chances of increasing travel website conversion if you address the following key areas.

1. Target customers that are doing their research.

If you effectively target customers through each relevant step of their research journey, and provide them with useful inspiration that allows them to know, trust and love your brand, you will be more likely to convert these researchers into bookers. You need to assist with the above points effectively. You want to demonstrate the fact that you’re an industry expert that will help them along the way. Make sure you highlight why you will make their trip exceptional, and they’ll be much more likely to remember you and return to book.

2. Help customers browsing on multiple devices.

As customers carry out their research, they often move between mobile and desktop devices. This journey isn’t well served, and increases friction for most customers, leading to 5 additional days required to book and 45% more touch points used.

You can help your customers by providing a synced-up logged in experience between devices, helping them to pick up where they left off. An alternative to this, is to allow them to share searches and products to a different device and return to their favourites. This also helps customers to discuss their purchases with others in their party.

3. 3. Help customers to return to your website.

If you know where customers abandoned your journey following their research, you can re-engage with them and make it easy for them to return to your site. You can do this by re-targeting these customers with emails/push notifications. Make sure you do this in an engaging way, and provide them with reasons/incentives to return and make a purchase on your site.

At a minimum, you should make it easy for customers to continue their journey if they leave and return on the same device. You want to present them with their recent searches and viewed products, and make it as easy as possible for them to jump back in where they left off.

 

Acknowledge that all of your customers have different needs, and cater for these.

There is a reason that travel bookings were traditionally handled by travel agents. Travel is complex, and different users have different needs. One of the best traits of a travel agent is digesting each customer’s needs and providing recommendations. They listen and refine the offerings until the customer has a trip that they are delighted to book.

You want your website to be able to act in the same kind of way.

Each customer’s desires, motivations for travelling, demographics and purchasing power are different.  You want to be able to present the most relevant products that appeal to each one of your customers in an enticing way to improve your travel website conversion.

So how can you do this?

1. Enable customers to search flexibly for what they need.

It is rare that customers visit a travel website with exact requirements, most are flexible on dates, location or even the type of trip. You need to provide them with flexible criteria in their search form to cater for this.

For customers that aren’t sure of many factors, they will want inspirational product pages that allow them to find their perfect type of trip.

2. Allow them to refine their choices in a way that works for them

Once customers do land on your results page, they need to be able to narrow down their selection in a way that works for them. In practise this means:

• • Offering a variety of filters that suit your users requirements

• • Offering different sort options

• • Providing an intelligent recommendation service, that presents the products that customers are most likely to book at the top of the list

3. Provide the right information at the right time

Key information that customers need when purchasing a travel product includes:

• • Location of the property/tour locations visited

• • Modern accommodation photos, particularly of the room type they will stay in

• • Specifics on what is included in the price and what is an optional extra

• • Key facilities/specifications

For some of your customers, they will have more specific information requirements like children’s facilities and check-out times. You want to make sure that this information is easily accessible, but not to overwhelm a customer by providing them with too much information at a first glance in your results pages.

Secret Escapes give you all of the detail you need for your tour.

4. Personalisation

You can’t write an article on travel websites, without mentioning the P word. Due to the vast variety of customers and needs, personalisation is extremely effective in travel. It is a great tool to use to make sure that you’re providing all of your customers with the best recommendations for them and removing any friction in the journey.

There are some key areas that can be personalised to help your customers find the best experience for them:

• The ordering of your results
• The order of filters
• The content displayed including the people in photos, the specs you choose to show & the highlights of the location you’re presenting

5. Allow customers to chat with you, as they would with an agent

Particularly if you’re offering a more complex product, such as a tailor-made trip, honeymoon or luxury stay, you can add a touch of the human element to your website and allow customers to chat with you directly.

Online chat works as a great tool to engage with your customers, reduce any of their uncertainty of your product and to help you provide tailored recommendations to that customer.

Help customers understand which product would be perfect for them.

Travel isn’t something that a customer can try on and return within 28 days, they can’t take it for a test drive. As far as expensive purchases go, it is one of the most substantial outgoings a customer will have, without truly knowing what their experience will be like. It is therefore critical that customers are given as much help as possible to find their ideal trip. 

The main way that a travel company can help customers understand what their experience will actually be like. is through using social proof.

Social proof comes in a variety of formats, but in essence, it involves using information from other customers to help customers make purchase decisions. 

1. Reviews.

83% of digital customers say that reviews are crucial to their choices when booking travel. Hotels with higher review ratings are almost 4 times more likely to result in a booking (if prices are the same). It is important for customers to be able to see reviews that they can relate to. This can be achieved through presenting reviews from similar demographics ie. families or couples. Where possible, it is also good to make sure that reviews are recent (within the last 3 months) and contain detailed content.

2. Highlight popularity & what ‘others like you’ are doing.

One proven way to help customers make a purchase decision is to let them know which of your deals are popular with your audience. As per reviews, the more relevant the recommendations, the more useful for your customers. Customers are reassured by understanding the decisions that others like them have made. High levels of purchase anxiety mean that reassurance is a very useful tool in helping customers feel confident when making their booking. This can be seen on travel websites in the form of rating scores, how many others are booking certain properties or why the hotel is good for your trip.

3. User Generated Content.

Especially in the younger demographic, more and more people are finding travel inspiration through social media. In 2019, 52% of people booked travel based on recommendations in their social network. Make sure your customers can advertise your products on their platforms. Get their permission to use their content on your site to provide others searching with an idea of the real-life experience they will gain through purchasing your products.

Help customers understand why they should book through your website.

With so many OTAs, affiliates and direct websites out there, it is common for customers to have a choice of websites to book the same product. You need customers to understand the value in booking through yours to boost your travel website conversion. Key questions that you can ask yourself are:

• How do you make the booking process easy?
• What support do your customers receive after booking?
• What promotional value do you offer to customers?
• Do they get any enhanced experiences if they book through you?
• What quality of service do you offer with your experience vs. competitors with similar offerings?

If you can find unique spots in your offering, then promote these on your website. If you can’t, then quickly work to find some. Executing strongly on your unique offering is also an important way to increase your repeat rate. If you get the experience right, customers will recommend you and want to come back to purchase with you again in the future.

 

Remove all friction and make it as easy as possible for customers to make a booking.

So, you’ve done all of the hard work. You’ve:

• • Presented customers with a flexible search
  • Allowed them to easily refine their choices in a way that suits them
  • Helped them to make the right purchase decision based on their need
  • Highlighted the value that they will receive through booking with you

And the customer is now ready to book with you.

The scary stat is that 81% of travel customers abandon their purchase when they get to the checkout.

One of the key areas that travel websites will want to solve, is that around 30% of customers leave due to a complex booking process, errors or lack of payment options. These are all issues that could be addressed on your site and prevent customers with real intent from purchasing.

It is crucial for travel companies to make the booking experience as effortless as possible and ensure that customers continue to trust them to improve their travel website conversion. This can be achieved through:

• Reducing the number of form fields a customer has to fill in to only the most critical ones
• Providing a range of payment options including:
  • Card types
  • Localised ways to pay
  • Instalment options, including deposits
  • Mobile payment methods
  • Storing customer details to reduce input time
  • Ensuring that you allow browsers to auto-fill customer details

You can also reduce purchase anxiety through:

• Promoting a cancellation period
• Proving reassurance of the value a customer will receive
• Providing reassurance through social proof at the checkout
• Providing a clear and brief summary of the purchase
• Allowing customers to easily edit any mistakes they’ve made like dates

Easyjet are doing a lot to reassure customers during Covid-19.

A lot of customers leave naturally once they have completed their research and found the final price for their trip on your website. You might still be able to convert these travel customers. You can use tactics like re-targeting them if you have their email address and reminding them of the value that you offer. If you really want to drive sales, you could offer an exit discount to purchase.

Kuoni provide a browser exit message to try to retain custom.

Now you should understand what makes travel purchases unique, why it is important to deliver an exceptional digital experience to increase travel website conversion and how to achieve this.

If you think you could benefit from some more support in delivering exceptional travel experiences to your customers, then get in touch & I will be more than happy to help.