By Mark Hodson, 101 Holidays editor
Last month I wrote a guide to how to start a travel website after attending the Travolution Summit in London. Yesterday I attended the Eye for Travel Online Travel Strategies conference and picked up some more handy hints for budding web entrepreneurs.
1. Focus on the user experience. Only 45% of people enjoy using the internet to plan and buy travel, according to research cited by Brian Clark, who later this year will launch a new travel search site in the UK, Fly.com. In 2007 the figure was 53%. So either we’re all getting less patient, or travel sites are getting worse.
2. Make search better. No travel website has yet made it easy for users to search for holidays. Chris Cuddy, Group MD of Cheapflights, admits the experience is “confusing”. Faisal Galaria (pictured above), who until recently was MD of Kayak in Europe, went further and said the user experience is generally “poor” and many of the prices shown are plain wrong.
3. Some people hate Ryanair. It’s hard to believe, but apparently a lot of travellers don’t want to use airlines that add on extra fees for checked baggage, etc. Fly.com is planning to add filters so users can weed out those airlines from their search results. Nice idea.
4. Don’t slash prices for the sake of it. According to Expedia, only 17% of its users buy the cheapest result presented. On the other hand, I had lunch with a lady who works for a company that buys hotel rooms and sells them to online travel agents. She told me they sometimes cut their rates by as little as 5p so they will be shown as the cheapest.
5. Don’t bother launching an online travel agent. According to Martin Verdon Roe of TripAdvisor, there are now 40 of them in the UK alone. And that’s just the big ones. No wonder the public is confused.
6. People love user reviews. Rod Cuthbert, chairman of Viator, said that when user reviews are added to the site’s city tours, bookings increase by 60% – even if the reviews are bad!
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