TRAVELLING is fun but when it comes to booking flights and travel-related stuff, not everyone gets the best experience or dream holiday that he or she desires.
The online travel space is just as crowded as the airspace, and if you are not used to finding and booking the best holiday deal, you may end up lost or not getting what you wanted.
Although there are hundreds of travel-related websites and apps that will give you all sorts of suggestions on flights, hotels and tours, hardly any would understand your unique needs when it comes to booking a holiday.
For example, you may book a hotel that looks nice, but access to food may be difficult.
UNDERSTANDING TRAVELLERS
While the central purpose of travel sites and apps is to offer travellers all the information and deals they need for the planned trip, features that really put a smile on their faces is the next step in travel bookings.
“This is what we’ve been working on over the past years, understanding travellers’ behaviours and preference when it comes to travel booking,” says Expedia Southeast Asia and India General Manager, Simon Fiquet.
Expedia (www.expedia.com), being one of the top travel sites in the world, knows that people, especially in Asia, are getting more demanding in their travel needs.
“Have you ever frowned at or felt unsure when you look at certain travel offers online? We study the behaviour of consumers so that we can improve our sites and mobile apps to give them what they really want,” he says.
Understanding travellers’ preference is not easy but Expedia has made it work for its Asian users.
“From our study, we found that travellers from different parts of Asia have different preferences when it comes to holiday bookings,” says Fiquet.
For example, Japanese travellers are particular about room cleanliness, the Koreans prefer rooms with a bathtub, Chinese and Indian travellers want good food and vegetarian choices, while the Muslims look for places with halal options.
“Therefore, for every country, we tweaked our sites and apps to best suit preferences so that travel bookings can be a breezy experience,” says Fiquet.
“Not just that, we also changed our product to make it faster and simpler.”
INNOVATION FIRST
Understanding the travellers’ preferences is not merely done via questionnaires, but also through extensive lab study.
Expedia, which spends US$1.2 billion (RM5.12 billion) on tech innovation last year, has its own Innovation Lab for Asia located in Singapore, the first for Asia Pacific. The Singapore Lab is the third for Expedia; one is its Bellevue, US headquarters and the other was recently launched in London.
“This is a mark of our focus on transforming travel through innovation and application of technology,” says Fiquet.
The Innovation Lab deploys electromyography, real-time eye tracking and a powerful slew of software, which when combined with real-time questions to the user, uncovers emotional responses such as delight or frustration, that are used to develop products and the way users interact with Expedia.
Using a “test and learn” approach, the insights provide a deeper understanding of the “whys” of consumer behaviour to not only improve its sites to be more user-friendly and efficient but to also ultimately increase booking confidence and delight.
The company performs more than 1,500 tests a year and it believes that even if half of them fail, that still equates to hundreds of wins. “This way we can understand the preferences of people from certain countries, and hence provide results and deals that cater to their wants,” says Fiquet.
IMPROVING PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
Fiquet says travel for Expedia is not just about making the average experience better with every single click, but through analyses and powerful data insights, also improving each person’s unique experience.
Only by being able to understand the data-driven insights, this can be done quickly and seamlessly.
Expedia employs 2,000 engineers and 700 data scientists to deliver personalised experiences that come with more choice, flexibility and savings for both its customers and partners.
“We are already preparing for the time when machines will be able to not just analyse but also understand when to act on real-time data. The companies that are going to win in the end are those that structure themselves to prepare for these changes, act on them and be first to market”, says Fiquet.
Another example of Expedia’s innovation is its Expedia Best Fare Search, which is its complex algorithm that has been perfected over the past 10 years. It filters from millions of options to 10,000 most likely booked flights, then narrows down to 1,600 most relevant options in three seconds. Every search is taken as an opportunity to understand search patterns better and allow to surface to the user better, faster and better-priced routes.
MOBILE THE WAY FORWARD
Asians are the biggest users of mobile Internet and most of their travel bookings are done via smartphones. Expedia saw 180 million downloads of its mobile app last year with nearly one third of all transactions and more than 65 per cent of hotel room night bookings coming through mobile platforms.
The other areas of interest to the company are Messaging, Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning but it is the confluence of all these that Expedia believes will be where the magic happens.
Moving forward, Expedia aims at bringing a lot of travel-related inventory online from flights and all-things travel.
“Personalisation will be critical and we realise people will stick to the device and app that get them to their dream destination fast,” he says.
“People don’t travel to go to a place. They travel for an outcome and the next big thing in travel will be a better use of information to make the travel inspiration and booking experience is more personalised and predictive in real-time.”
EXPEDIA INNOVATIONS
MAKING it easy for users to do research and bookings is key and here are some of Expedia’s recent creations:
1. Scratchpad: Since travellers make searches across smartphones, tablets and desktops, noting down prices and comparing to find the best deal, there’s nothing more frustrating than having to start all over again if the search cannot be completed in a given time.
Expedia created Scratchpad — an intelligent personal assistant — to solve this problem. Simply login and in whatever device you are searching on, all your searches will be saved. More importantly, they are automatically updated with the latest prices.
2. Price Trends: Appearing as a new visual graph in search results page when customers are logged into their Expedia account, Price Trends is a continuous shopping tool that aggregates pricing data for a specific destination based on recent user searches and analyses high/mid/low points by range over the last 14 days to show deeper insights regarding how the current flight price compares to recent historical data.
3. Price Prediction: This feature draws from Expedia’s huge volume of historical travel data and real-time insights regarding airline inventory and industry booking trends. It displays recommendations for travellers, indicating the best time to book based on how prices for a given flight search are expected to increase/decrease over time.
4. Real-Time Reviews: Triggers sent to customers when their flight has landed or when various stages of their hotel stay are complete (after check-in and at the end of their trip). With this feature, Expedia partnerscan track Real Time Feedback and if it’s negative, they have an opportunity to fix it before it becomes made permanent online, creating a win-win for both travellers and the providers. Currently, there are more than 8.7 million Real-Time reviews.