Why is a booking journey so important?
A user-centred booking journey is not just a nice-to-have but a strategic imperative. It directly impacts a company’s bottom line, reputation, and future growth prospects. Investing in a user-centric booking experience is investing in sustainable business success.
Despite this, lots of businesses don’t invest time and research into optimising their booking journeys. So I put together 10 steps to help ensure your user’s booking journey is easy and optimised (and heavenly).
Step one: know your digital customers:
The MOST IMPORTANT step and one that provides the foundation for all the others. Talk to your customers to understand their desires, ambitions, concerns, and fears when they are engaging with your organisation. What do they worry about when they’re booking a holiday? What do they hope for? Consider creating personas and experience maps based on this insight to guide your design decisions and identify opportunities.
Step two: don’t ask for commitment too early:
Trying to push customers into booking before they’re ready isn’t going to work. They need to trust and understand your offering. Use the insight you’ve gained to understand their requirements and make sure they have everything they need before inviting them to book.
Step three: remove distractions:
Once they’ve made the decision to book, the hard work is done; they’re convinced. Don’t give them any reason to leave the booking process and go wandering off. Remove primary navigation and do everything you can to encourage them forward towards payment. The next few points give you some ideas.
Step four: long journey, short pages:
Long pages are intimidating and leave people feeling adrift. It’s far better to break the process into more manageable steps – every time they click on a ‘Continue’ or ‘Next’ button, they’re a little more committed. Shorter pages also make errors easier to handle. And don’t forget a progress indicator to help anchor them.
Step five: clear error messaging:
Shorter pages will help avoid a depressing list of errors but help customers quickly address errors. Don’t rely on colour alone to identify errors (not everyone can see it) and be very clear about what’s wrong and how to correct it.
Step six: make sure the way forward is clear:
Avoid multiple calls to action and anything that will make your customer go backwards and forwards within a step.
Step seven: let people switch platforms:
People often require reassurance before paying for big-ticket items and may want to pay over the phone even if they’ve entered all their information online. Don’t create work for them (or you) by making them repeat themselves; allow them to move from online to phone seamlessly, saving and retrieving any details they’ve already entered. Allowing them to save their information also makes it easier if they need to talk to companions, find their passport, check their bank account, etc.
Step eight: never leave customers wondering:
Never make people go backwards in the booking process. Make sure that the decisions they’ve made are clear and visible to them to provide reassurance and display a running total if extras are being added.
Step nine: upsell with care:
Don’t interrupt the flow or offer things they can’t have. On top of this, no dark patterns – don’t trick someone into buying something by making it difficult to say no.
Step ten: it’s not over until it begins:
The time between booking and travel provides you with a fully engaged audience; use it wisely. Carefully curated communication can help build the anticipation and the relationship. Customers may be more inclined to accept add-ons when they’ve had a little while to recover from the initial expenditure
Build your own path to booking heaven:
Book your user journey discovery session to assess the strengths and opportunities within your current user experience and gain expert guidance on where to focus your efforts, we’d love to talk.
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