The ever rising popularity of consumers shopping online has had massive implications for the travel industry. With more and more people booking travel and holidays online, great importance must be placed on creating robust, easy to use and highly personalised sites that can handle the increasing amounts of traffic and competition.

 

Up-sell and Cross-sell

 

With the help of personalisation, online travel vendors should present travellers with additional buying options as they plan their trips – offering car hire, hotel rooms or excursions relevant to them based on a customer profile that is updated in real-time, as the customer searches the site. For example, a shopper may book a holiday to India and then click to log out of the site. At this point a pop-up could appear offering a discounted excursion to the Taj Mahal, helping the retailer to effectively up-sell.

 

Robustness

 

Travel websites must be robust enough to cope with large amounts of traffic, especially during peak seasons such as Easter, when the number of consumers booking online will soar. Sites also need to factor in scalability to handle increasing amounts of bookings, as online travel becomes even more popular over the next five years.

 

Shopping Cart Abandonment

 

All too often shoppers choose a flight or hotel they want, but then abandon their selection prior to the actual purchase. Decreasing your ‘shopping cart abandonment’ rates is a matter of understanding what drives shoppers to make their choices in the first place, and ensuring the sale is closed. Travel sites can do this by alerting buyers to full costs early in the process. For example, many consumers click through several pages to choose flights they want before abandoning the purchase at the point when airport and further taxes are added to the price. Sites should also make it easy to edit orders, for instance allowing travelers to be flexible with dates and times throughout the booking process.