Posted inTravel / Web Designing

5 Things Due To Which Online Travel Businesses Lose Potential Bookings

Travel activity portals have started engulfing the online travel market, and people are willing to be a part of this phenomenon. Even then, online travel businesses seem to struggle a lot with hesitant customers. Travel activity websites such as Thrillophilia, Viator, and Peek have been attracting a lot of customers, and yet there’s this underlying problem that many other travel activity websites need to address.
Despite all the details and doing everything right (apparently), businesses lose their online customers who come to their websites to book a travel activity.
Let’s take a look at the 5 major issues that trigger the instances of people walking away from a travel booking website.

  • No photos/Poor photos

Nothing mars a website faster than the absence of quality content. And given the case that we are talking about online travel booking, photographs matter a lot. But that’s not all, the quality of the photographs further plays a very important role.
Nobody wants to see those low-resolution images that don’t offer a good viewing experience. If you want to upload images of the tourist destinations you offer, make sure they are of good quality.
And just in case your website is offering a new hotel, that’s when images become the prime necessity. Invest in a good DSLR and take photos from different angles to show people what you are offering.

  • Difficult Navigation

This is another deal-breaker for most of the potential customers who visit a travel website.  They feel like unguided visitors stranded on a platform with too many options and nowhere to go.  People like websites which can let them look around and make a booking in the least number of clicks. Online travel booking websites that haven’t performed well in a long time are mostly the ones that didn’t provide easy navigation and good user experience.

  • Not Giving Ample Booking Options

Not all travelers are okay with making full payment in advance. Most of the customers who either like to book a hotel with half of the total amount, some part of it or simply make a booking and pay once they’ve reached their destination. If you don’t give them an option of how they’d like to book, they’ll look for other options.

  • Absence of Multiple Login Options

News: you don’t always need to have a customer’s email addresses to register them on your website. You can also use their Facebook, Twitter and G+ accounts to do so.
News: You don’t necessarily HAVE TO have your customers register on your website. They should also have the liberty to sign in as a guest. Yes, they’ll need to enter their details again and again, but you must give them the freedom to not register if they don’t want to.
If online travel businesses are too pushy about registration, and that too with just one method, the website is destined to fail.

  • Cancellation Policy and Ease

What? You want to cancel your booking? No, we can’t let you do that. Oh wait, we can allow you to cancel the booking, but we are going to make it really difficult for you. And about the booking amount you paid, we never mentioned anything about refunds. And yet, we expect our business to flourish. And pigs can fly.
If you didn’t get the sarcasm in here: don’t be this company.
Conclusion
The good news after all these points we discussed above is that these issues are easily fixable. It doesn’t take much to build a good quality online travel booking website. And while you are trying our best to improve user experience, make sure you tell them how much they saved after finalizing the booking so that they know what happened. And be proactive in your approach; remind them when their planned trip is just around the corner. Keep them informed of what’s next, and thank them whenever possible.
And above all, while your travel website is being built, make sure it is able to handle an awesome level of traffic when the travel season is at its peak. Cheers!

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