Interesting to hear Jilly Welch's (Fortune Cookie) diagnosis of the problems that plague many travel sites. In short: research and booking are being treated as separate processes, which leads to overlong, unnecessarily complex transactions.
One of Jilly's suggestions is to put an editorial spin on data capture where possible. She points out that a day-month-year date search can be humanised by flagging up school holidays, or the best time to visit particular destinations.
Black Tomato gets praise for using its top-level navigation to guide users to 'Active Time', 'Escape Time' and so forth. Which is better than a dull old 'holiday type' drop down.
Expedia, though, is marked down for channeling users from its (highly praised) Inspiroscope, which captures information in an engaging way, to flat, text-heavy pages, which shatter the illusion.
And as for the Virgin Holidays interface...
Nathan Midgley
You start out excited by your holiday in Mauritius; six pages in there's a loss of purchase momentumWhy? Two words: data entry. Nobody wants to do that stuff. But as an audience member points out, the complex legislation and technological infrastructure involved in travel purchases means a fair amount of data entry is unavoidable.
One of Jilly's suggestions is to put an editorial spin on data capture where possible. She points out that a day-month-year date search can be humanised by flagging up school holidays, or the best time to visit particular destinations.
Black Tomato gets praise for using its top-level navigation to guide users to 'Active Time', 'Escape Time' and so forth. Which is better than a dull old 'holiday type' drop down.
Expedia, though, is marked down for channeling users from its (highly praised) Inspiroscope, which captures information in an engaging way, to flat, text-heavy pages, which shatter the illusion.
And as for the Virgin Holidays interface...
I haven't picked on Virgin Holidays because it's awful; I've picked on it because it's moderate and unexciting
Nathan Midgley
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