Virgin Holidays website up 25% - what makes their site different?

As reported by M-Travel, Virgin Holidays has recently seen online conversions rise 25%. Key to this strategy was usability.

As quoted by M-Travel, the Virgin Holidays website operations manager, said:

We needed to produce a site that was as simple as possible for our customers to use.  Therefore the imagery was made larger, the navigation easier and the whole user journey considerably enhanced.  Additional search criteria were also added such as the ability to search by region or country through maps and drop down menu

Now of course you can’t put down an increase in this conversion purely down to website design. Other factors that probably have an impact are:

• Their competitors in the UK are busy merging - and maybe are taking their eyes off the ball.
• Maybe they just got better at marketing - because conversion figures are as much about getting the right visitors as about having the right site
• Maybe Virgin Holidays has a strong proportion of repeat bookers who are comfortable going back to a website the next year - as long as the booking process is clear and understandable. i.e. the increase in conversion could be a long term trend from their existing customer base rather than specific design features that have been changed this year. The trend needs to be factored out from the figures in order to understand what impact the website improvements have made.

Also conversion figures can be misleading when used as part of a PR statement or interview - it is entirely possible (but unlikely) that you can have a decrease in sales at the same time as an increase in conversion. Certainly the 25% figure is not a 25% increase in sales.

However, I firmly believe that usability based web design can drive improvements in sales. They are correlated.

Anything obviously different about the Virgin Holidays website to explain the uplift?
One of the elements that I found interesting and fairly unique is the “retained search”. When you make a holiday availability search on the website the search criteria are retained in the top left corner of the page.

For example, I searched for Kissimee for 25th November for 7 nights etc….. and now I can navigate around the site (for example looking at further details about the flight or hotel) - and fairly easily (from every screen) get back to the results list I found previously.

I expect this is a really helpful feature to users and would love to see the feedback from usability testing on this one.

The one competitor that I know has something similar is Thomson.co.uk

Their approach is slightly different in that they are based around retaining recently viewed pages rather than recent product searches.

The advantages about recent pages vs recent searches are:

• It helps users navigate around large websites with many supporting pages (rather than sites centred around a booking engine)
• If you have multiple booking engines (like Thomson do), you don’t have to worry about different display styles depending whether it was a flight, a hotel, a package holiday etc.
• You have less of a legal issue with retained personal data - because you are not storing date and place of proposed holiday (which may be data that ought not be sat in a cookie). (Notice also how Thomson let you turn their functionality off) [This is not legal advice blah blah blah]
• Probably easier to code!

The other interesting aspect of both of these features is that these pages or search results are retained even when the user leaves the website. You can leave either website, navigate to a competitor, check out their prices and availability, come back to either Virgin Holidays or Thomson, and then continue from where you left off. This is probably what makes it a winner.

Everyone will have this next year now although it is probably too late for Jan 08……

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