Examples: Booking Categories data analysis

You can use the data in the Booking Categories report to adjust your travel product strategy.

The following examples show ways to use Booking Categories data:

• For categories:

  High bookings and/or Revenue Percentage

  These represent the most important categories for your site. Driving small improvements in these categories often represents a larger opportunity than focusing on less important online categories.

  Low Product or Room Nights Conversion Rate

  This indicates a merchandising problem for this category of travel products. This ratio measures how effective your overall product offer, creative, and pricing is at driving visitors to convert. If this ratio is much lower for a subcategory than it is for the overall parent, then consider investing in improvements to this subcategory.

• For Products:

  High Product/Room Rate Views and High Conversion

  Maximize Exposure and Optimize. Travel products with the highest number of views and a high conversion are your most popular products. Ensure that you are maximizing exposure opportunities for upgrades and trip extras on these product pages to increase Average Booking Value and customer lifetime value. Also, ensure that the descriptions and images of these products are optimized to improve conversion further.

  Low Product/Room Rate Views and High Conversion: Drive Awareness

  These travel products convert customers but are underexposed. Consider promoting these items prominently on your home and category pages, and using marketing campaigns to drive interest. For a hotel product, consider making improvements to the hotel details page, such as the images, location map, and area description to encourage more visitors to click through to the rate selection page. For a flight product, consider adding or improving comparison tools to give your visitors as many flight and route options as possible.

  High Product/Room Rate Views and Low Conversion: Improve Offering

  These items draw customer interest, but do not drive bookings. There might be an opportunity to improve the way you differentiate your rates or fares to encourage visitors to select one and therefore capitalize on this high customer interest. For hotel products, improve the description around the different room types so that it is clear to the customer what they are buying. For flights, improve the differentiation between your fare options by clearly displaying any benefits that the visitor receives with each fare.

  Low Product/Room Rate Views and Low Conversion: Ensure Placement

  These might be niche or very seasonal products and therefore are drawing minimal interest and conversion at this time. Ensure that site search tools allow visitors to reach these products easily. Consider adding or improving your product search to include budget themed searches such as '10 top underrated cities', to give you a portal by which to increase the exposure of lesser viewed products.

  High Product or Room Rate Views / Products or Room Nights Booked Ratio

  This is effectively a look-to-book ratio. Visitors that repeatedly view room rate, flight options, or fare selections are often searching for more information before they are ready to make their booking. Use Clickstream or TruePath reports to identify any repetitive steps in the product selection process.

  High Product or Room Rate Views and High Abandonment Rate

  For travel products that have both a high number of views and a high abandonment rate there might be a pricing or process problem.

  High abandonment might indicate that there is competitive pricing pressure from a third party. In this case, you could consider reducing the price of the product, offering a promotion, or improving the product differentiation by clearly stating, in an attractive and visual manner, exactly what the visitor gets for the price (for example, room type or flight cabin images, and descriptions) and any rate/fare flexibility that is offered.

  Consider improving the product selection experience to differentiate your brand further from your competitor with something other than price. Use the Geography report to identify your top markets and then apply a segment (using criteria of visitor country) to the Booking Categories report to identify if abandonment is higher for any particular language or geographic location. Based on your findings consider offering product descriptions in different language options. Also prominently display any terms and conditions for the rate or fare selected to reduce abandonment.

Consider improvements to the detailed descriptions on your selection pages. For hotels, do you differentiate your room offerings by displaying images or videos that highlight what each room type actually looks like? For flights, do you show seat maps and in-flight entertainment options for each aircraft type so that your visitors can make an informed choice?

Give your visitors more control over factors that influence price with relevant and well-presented information. Clearly display any rate/fare conditions and cancellation charges on the rates/fare selection page. Do you have enough language and currency options to cater to your most popular markets and to avoid translation barriers? Also, when a visitor has made their room or flight selection, be sure to display the final price clearly, including a breakdown of any taxes and fees. This should minimize visitor navigation back to the rates page to recheck the price.

Consider new or improved comparison tools so that visitors can see all the choices before they make their selection.