In the travel industry, user experience (UX) can make or break your business. UX includes everything — from landing page design to customer service — that impacts how the user feels about your company when they interact with your website.
Travelers want to find the best deals easily, and you’ve got plenty of competition. If key information is hard to locate or your booking process looks like a hassle, they’ll bounce without a second thought. This guide can help improve your travel site’s UX, win your customers’ trust, and earn more bookings.
Slow-loading pages are a sure way to chase off customers — especially on mobile devices, where the customer journey most often begins. Doing a speed test to identify slow pages is a great place to start taking your site’s UX to the next level.
You can simulate different network conditions with Network Throttling on Chrome with these step-by-step instructions from Browserstack. Then, take these steps to speed up slow pages, aiming for loading times between 1 and 4 seconds.
Check for oversized images ― anything larger than 20 megabytes will be a problem. Try to keep images smaller than 2 megabytes. Shopify has a great cheat sheet for optimizing your web images.
Use WebP format for high resolution photos that take up less space than JPEG and PNG format for more complex graphic images. Do any necessary enhancement or compression before uploading them.
Add alt text to your images so your content is accessible to visually impaired users who rely on screen readers. Search engines consider this too, so well-crafted alt text can also help improve your rankings.
Update your widgets and make sure they are functioning properly.
Once you’ve addressed slow-loading pages, take a closer look at how your website appears and functions on mobile. Are images and text oversized, distorted, or only partially visible on smaller screens? Do users have to do a lot of scrolling to find important information? These issues quickly lead to frustration and abandonment, but they’re fairly easy to fix.
Engage attention with inviting photos and videos, and keep your most important information above the fold.
Keep your design clean and simple. Let attractive photos of destinations and accommodations speak for themselves without going overboard with graphic design embellishments or blocks of text.
Prioritize readability by using fonts that are easy to scan, and make adjustments to font sizes for the mobile version of your site.
Make every word count. Keeping your language clear and concise makes it easier to optimize for mobile and improves your chances of conversion.
As a rule, the fewer hoops customers have to jump through, the happier they’ll be with their experience. This can be a challenge in the travel industry, though, as you have to collect more information to provide helpful and accurate results to travelers.
Keep menus organized and accessible. A prominent, clearly labeled menu with top-level information that stays in view as the user scrolls accomplishes this nicely.
Group related information together. Focus on the customer’s journey and anticipate their needs. Try including helpful weather updates and seasonal attractions in intuitive locations on the page.
Reduce friction and manage expectations. Be transparent and try to eliminate overwhelm where you can. Rather than trying to fit everything on a single booking page, try breaking it down into a few steps with a progress bar. Give users a quick overview of what information they’ll need and how much further they need to go.
Create intuitive forms, and don't require unnecessary information.
Check out these examples of travel websites that found unique ways to accomplish these goals.
Effective customer service is always a balancing act, but a few integrations can make it easier on yourself and your customers. An AI chatbot can help field FAQ’s and route more complex questions to your customer service team.
Consider an integration for self-service cancellation and subscription management. No one wants to be stuck in limbo waiting on an email to confirm whether they’ll be charged for a booking they had to cancel.
To keep your customer data secure, use SSL encryption, only use secure payment processors, and implement multifactor authentication protocols. Make sure all your processes are covered in your company’s cybersecurity plan.