What is UX and is it important?

UX stands for User Experience and it describes the behavior of a person during the usage of a software solution and the feelings that person develops. Let’s see how important it is and how much it affects our bookings.

• SEO & Search Engines (eg Google): SEO, Search Engine Optimization is the optimization of the website to increase traffic. Nowadays search engines have evolved and give priority to websites that provide the best user experience. As a result, the UX becomes an integral part of SEO and affects your website’s ranking in search engine results.
• Conversion rate: Conversion rate is the percentage that shows how many of your booking engine’s visitors will complete their purchase. A booking engine that follows the best UX practices, as they have been set by users themselves, has an increased chance of driving the user to the desired result.

How to implement my booking engine on my website?

Iframe: Iframe is a piece of code that the developer inserts into your web page and hosts a mini website inside your website. This mini website is your booking engine. Although we support this feature, we call it WhiteLabel, we don’t suggest it. Google might have conflicts following the journey of the reservation and this will cause issues with your conversion rate. Also, important payment gateways, as PayPal do not trust payment via iFrames which makes it difficult to implement more payment ways.

Plugin: An additional application that is installed on your website software. This is an implementation that Travelotopos does not support and of course, we do not suggest. Developing a plugin should take into consideration the main website software’s version in combination with the other plugins as well. An update of anything could cause conflicts with the booking engine plugin. This make the booking process really unstable.

Redirection: The most tested and simple way, is inserting a link to your website, which will open your booking engine in the same or a new tab. This the way is the one that Travelotopos suggests. You just need to implement your branding guidelines to Travelotopos admin’s section.

Clicks & Google – Looking for your clicks?

If you are looking for your clicks please see your Google Analytics account. Inside Travelotopos’ admin section you can enter your Google Tag Manager ID, which means in your Google Analytics account you can see the analytics referring to your website and to your booking engine as well. By linking your website to your booking engine and the other way around, you create backlinks. Backlinks are important for SEO, as they help your website with the organic ranking. Also, they help booking engines finding your website much quicker when it comes to search.

Best practices for better payment UX

Since we have understood the importance of UX let’s focus on the best practices a booking engine must follow for the most important part, the payment of the reservation.

• Simplify the process: Travelotopos is always looking to help users complete their bookings by making the minimum effort. From your side, you just need to ask for the minimum information you need, in order to complete the booking. You can always use custom emails to ask to retrieve more information later on.
• Mobile friendly UIs: As travelotopos we are always updating our UI according to best practices so you only need to make sure your titles and content fit to mobile screens.  
• Provide payment choices: Users feel more safe when a booking engine provides more than one payment options. Review your client’s origin and think about adding more known payment gateways such as Stripe or PayPal.
• Transparent Pricing: Adjust your pricing to include all fees. Users that find out about extra fees on checkout page are more likely to immediately stop the reservation process. 
• Error Handling: If the reservation cannot be completed due to any reason, UI should reflect that and a message should be shown to the user.  
• Confirmation and Feedback: As soon as the reservation process is completed the user should be aware of that with a message and/or confirmation email.
• User Assistance: A user assistance tool makes the user feel confident that there is someone to help him in every step of the reservation process.
• Testing: Continuous testing in every process/feature of the booking engine is very important and part of our daily routine.

Conversion Rate

The average conversion rate in travel industry is between 0.2% and 2%. If your website has a conversion rate between 2% and 4% is among the 20% of the best websites in travel industry and if the conversion rate is over 4% your website is among the 10% of best websites of travel industry. (source Littledata)

Travelotopos booking engines have an average conversion of almost 4% and some of our clients have used the booking engine in the most efficient way, and they’ve reached a conversion of 25%**.

** You can find some suppliers more that one time in this screenshot because of  the reservation’s origin (direct, referral, paid search etc)

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