8 Quick Tips For Improving UX On Your Booking Website
User Experience (UX) is essential in modern travel and hospitality marketing.
A recent report suggests that a frictionless UX design has the potential to increase conversion rates by up to 400%.
And it’s not hard to see why.
Booking should be a great experience.
When it comes to optimising your booking website, UX ought to be your primary focus.
The following tips will provide actionable advice for boosting the UX on your site so you can reduce bounce rates and start making more online sales.
In this blog about improving user experience on booking websites, I’ll tell you about:
Optimising your booking website for mobile
Keeping everything short and sweet
Building trust through transparency
Cleaning up the mess
Split testing the crap out of your webpages
Driving some A out of your CTAs
Using a simple copywriting formula to improve UX
Chatting like an authentic homo sapien
Without further ado, let’s dive in.
1) Make it Mobile Friendly
This is one tip you can’t afford to ignore.
Across nine markets, researching hotels and airfares on a mobile device is as common as shopping for clothing. In this modern era of digital travel and online booking, mobile matters.
Your website needs to be 100% optimised for phones if you want to give users the best possible experience.
Here are some quick ways to boost your website’s performance on mobile:
Test and improve page loading times.
Enable Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).
Build an app version of your site.
Take advantage of Google’s mobile-friendly tool.
If you were a child or a parent in the early 2000s, you might remember Neopets. They were these virtual pets you carried around in your pocket.
As a Neopet owner, you needed to keep your little digital friend fed and groomed regularly to keep them alive and happy.
These days, our cellphones are like Neopets.
The difference being that we don’t check on them every few hours – we check on them 160 times a day.
Don’t let your booking website starve to death because it isn’t built for mobile. Optimise.
2) Menos es Más (Less = More)
One of the most important parts of user experience is the elimination of unnecessary words, clicks, steps, learning curves, and anything else that stands between your customer and what they’re trying to achieve.
Cut out the fluff.
The more screens a user has to click through to get to the purchase screen, the more opportunities they have to change their mind.
The more words you use to convey a single message, the less likely someone will be to read it.
Simplicity is paramount to great UX.
The purpose of a booking platform is to help people book something.
Whether you’re selling flights, accommodation, tours, excursions, event tickets, or whatever – the goal remains the same.
For this reason, your primary objective should always be to “make booking super accessible”.
Here are some ways you can do that:
Have a search bar in the centre of your homepage.
Ask “Can I say this in fewer words?” for every piece of copy on your site.
Wait until after a user has made a purchase to try and sell them add-ons.
Don’t distract the user with other offers or links if their intent is clear.
In the words of American novelist Elmore Leonard, “I leave out the parts that people skip.”
3) Use Truth to Build Trust
Honesty is a huge part of UX.
If users can’t trust your brand, they’re not going to buy.
And in 2021, booking platforms cannot afford to keep treading water when it comes to regaining consumer trust. These times are no longer “unprecedented” – we had all of last year to get prepared.
So don’t hide the grisly details.
People know that travel and hospitality are still in a fragile state. They won’t thank you for pretending everything is 100% back to normal... they’ll just assume you’re lying to them.
The solution? Tell it as it is.
Warn people of the possibilities of cancellations and unforeseen problems arising.
Better yet, promise some kind of recompense should things go awry.
The more real you are with your customers, the more trust you will earn. And trust is the impetus of powerful UX.
4) Cleanse the Clutter
There are few website features more off-putting than a messy, confusing interface.
As tempting as it might be to try and cram as much information about your brand and services into every square inch of the page, it’s probably doing more harm than good.
To optimise your booking website for UX, cleanse it of all clutter, prioritising the most important information up top.
If your website feels cluttered, try these tips for tidying it up:
If there is a lot that needs to be said, make ‘em scroll for it.
Use concise body copy when describing the features and benefits of your service. One or two sentences is usually enough.
Cut out anything that doesn’t serve your page’s primary purpose.
Organise the elements of each page in a logical pattern, bearing in mind the reading habits of a typical user.
By eliminating anything on the page that won’t lead to a sale or offer relevant value to your customers, your bounce rate should drop dramatically.
5) Embrace Testing
Online marketing is half-science, half-guesswork.
But we can use science to make much more astute guesses, resulting in more successful sales.
The way to do this is to test everything.
Try out using different headlines, CTAs, positioning of site elements, testimonials, background colours, sign-up forms, fonts… anything that can be easily mixed up.
Split testing will not only help you finetune your booking platform to be ultra-tailored to the user, but it will also give you great insights into what sort of language, design, and automation appeals to your perfect customer.
When testing, keep in mind that it’s best to limit the number of variables between tests.
If you are testing Headline A on a Tuesday evening with a group of 500 users, make sure the Headline B test begins on a Tuesday evening with a group of the same size.
6) Centralise Your CTAs
This tip will be short and sweet:
Put your calls to action where the user will actually see them.
I am constantly baffled by the number of brands that appear to be actively hiding the big button that they want users to click.
For booking platforms, I strongly recommended including a search bar or booking form above the fold on your website homepage.
When it comes to UX, always keep this thought in mind: What are my customers trying to do?
Answer that, and you’ll know exactly what you can do to help them.
7) Promise, Prove, Compare, Compel.
If you want your customers to connect with your copy you need it to speak to their emotions.
A good formula for doing this is Promise > Prove > Compare > Compel.
Start with an emotionally driven promise, something that conveys the benefit of whatever it is you’re describing. This will grab their attention and lure them into reading the body copy.
Next, you’ll want to reassure the customer that your promise isn’t too good to be true. Do this by offering a piece of proof.
Your proof might be:
Social (a testimonial from a happy customer)
Statistical (empirical evidence from a verified study)
Visual (a video or photo that supports your claim)
Now that the user’s analytical brain has been assuaged, it’s time to check back in with their emotional side. You can do this by comparing your promise with an undesirable alternative.
You might directly call out a competitor if you’re selling something that’s of much better value/quality than theirs. Or you can simply compare your customer’s life with and without your product.
Lastly, compel the user to take whatever action you want them to take.
Make your CTA clear and straight to the point. You’ve got the user on the hook now, all that’s left to do is show them where to go.
Note: This is a great formula if you don’t have the budget to hire a professional copywriter. Promise, Prove, Compare, Compel will work for many elements of your website, but it isn’t perfect.
8) Humanise Everything
These days, billion-dollar companies spend a fortune on hiring UX specialists and copywriters to help them sound like the working class.
This gives everyday folk like us a huge advantage.
We don’t have to fake it to sound genuine – we just have to talk like we normally do.
UX is all about making your users feel comfortable when they operate on your site. And as a socially driven species, we are best brought to comfort through simple humanity.
Here are a few tips for making your booking website come across as more human:
Speak to one person – use ‘you’ and ‘I’ pronouns where appropriate.
Cut out the industry jargon.
Writing conversationally, not as if you’re crafting a nonfiction novel.
Use contractions like “you’d”, “we’re”, and “should’ve” in your copy.
Think of how you might tell a friend or close relative about your brand; that’s the kind of language you should be using.
Final Thoughts
At the end of the day, User Experience is all about simplifying the booking process for your customers.
The tips above form an outline of what you should be doing to optimise your website for the user. They are not all you can do.
If anything, this blog should hopefully inspire you to start always thinking about ways you can put user experience first. By adopting a user-first mindset, your sales and customer loyalty will naturally continue to grow.
For more advice on growing your business in 2021, check out some of my other blogs: