The customer
Hotels4U.com is an award-winning website designed to make booking hotels quick and easy 24 hours a day, seven days a week. As part of the Thomas Cook group, Hotels4U has over 200 staff with a combined travel experience of more than 250 years. With over 200,000 competitively priced properties worldwide, Hotels4U has processed more than eight million hotel bookings.
The challenge
While overall holiday bookings have continued to see flat growth, online bookings have been rapidly growing, making it the increasingly preferred way for holidaymakers, business travellers and travel agents to purchase hotels reservations.However, as this is a highly competitive market, Hotels4U needed to improve visitor conversion in order to stay ahead of its competitors. It was already a successful company, but wanted to drive business growth further by increasing online sales through their website with a modest budget pool.
The complexity of online bookings can lead to a high volume of support issues and abandonment rates, so Hotels4U decided it was essential to improve and simplify the search-to-book process to increase conversions from website visits. Hotels4U wanted to implement an aggressive test strategy to create and amend content for a friendlier consumer experience and help it stand out from hundreds of online travel agency competitors.
Hotels4U also wanted to capitalise on the mobile opportunity presented by the rise of smartphones, but it had limited resource available for the project.
The solution
Hotels4U selected Webtrends – the global leader in digital marketing optimisation and relevance through real-time, unified analytics and customer intelligence – for its Optimize solution: a testing and targeting platform that provides reliable results, scalability to grow with success, and reporting to provide actionable insights.
Webtrends Optimize combines a complete selection of test types, including A/B and multivariate tests. It helps retailers improve cart conversion and average order value, reduce cart abandonment and customer service costs, and build customer relationships across digital channels.
The solution consists of two parts – platform and service. The Webtrends Optimize team bring the expertise and development resources to the relationship and work closely with Hotels4U to ensure the long-term optimisation strategy is executed in line with growth expectations. Hotels4U’sinternal team worked closely with the Webtrends Optimize team to define processes, targets and objectives.
Using Optimize, the team were able to deliver an exclusive testing package capable of detailed analysis and recommendations for website amendments. The team built multivariate test plans that could be rolled out and updated over a period of time to continually improve the customer experience.
The three main areas of focus for multivariate testing on the website were the home page, hotel details page and the booking funnel. These areas were chosen for the direct impact changes would have on the conversion uplift.
On the mobile side of the project, the Webtrends team used their expertise to recommend a number of new smartphone designs. Using Optimize, the team tested multiple mobile versions of the site to find the optimal design for Hotels4U’s visitors.
Results
By running multivariate testing campaigns with Optimize, Hotels4U could easily determine what was working and what was not based on customer data, and make changes tocontent on its website accordingly. This allowed for sub-optimal tests to then be quickly spotted and amended,producing more targeted results.
As a result of the multivariate testing, Hotels4U experienced a 5.52 per cent lift in visitor conversions and online bookings – a significant achievement for an already successful website.
On its mobile site, Hotels4U experienced a 61 per cent increase in searches on mobile devices, with a 22 per cent lift in visitors viewing hotel pages on the mobile channel.
“Internal opinion about what will work best has become largely irrelevant at Hotels4U because customer interaction and feedback now shapes the evolution of our website as we continue to optimize the booking funnel,” said Steven Moore, Head of eCommerce, Hotels4U.
“Through mobile site optimisation with Webtrends, we have been able to solve part of the puzzle that plagues every marketer today – the multi-channel problem. We felt we were missing a clear opportunity with visitors who browse on their smartphones on the go. Webtrends was able to develop a solution without placing additional burden on internal resources. Their recommendeddesigns have driven a 61 per cent increase in search and 22 per cent lift in visitors seeing our hotel pages through our mobile channel, effectively making it easier for our customers to find what they are looking for and facilitating the multi-channel journey.”
“The travel industry is very, very competitive as online has now become the preferred way for consumers to book their holidays. Hotels4U understands the importance of optimising its website to be as competitive as possible, and has been working alongside Webtrends to create and run detailed testing campaigns,” said Geoff Pennells, Regional Director, Travel, Webtrends.
“To see a 5.52 per cent increase in conversions is a fantastic result for a company that processes as many bookings as Hotels4U does. Hotesl4U is wise to the opportunities presented by the boom in smartphones and has moved early to optimise its mobile platform and become a true multi-channel player. We look forward to continuing the optimisation journey with Hotels4U across multiple channels.”