Travel Weekly booking conversion metric FUD

I have done my fair share of “consulting” in the past. I even might describe myself as an ecommerce consultant from time to time (including on this blog!) - however mainly my client work has been as an external contractor (with the main difference between a consultant and a contractor being who owns the intellectual property to work undertaken on behalf of a client - consultants do – contractors don’t – the 2nd difference being a few hundred dollars on the day rate)

One of the best ways of generating new business as a consultant is to tell someone they have a problem – because naturally people then want to pay to get their problem solved. This is why I am not very good at consultant marketing because I really don’t like to tell people about problems they are already probably aware of – also I consider it a bit patronising for me to say “did you know you could do this better” – as there is probably a valid reason why they haven’t done it that way in the first place….

As a consultant I tend to get brought in when someone needs a solution – not when someone wants to know if they have any problems or not. Besides, currently I limit myself to a maximum of 1 day a week doing consulting with the rest of my time solving my own business challenges – not other people’s problems!

Sometimes I see other consultants raising this whole “you have a problem, pay us to fix it” and I cringe. The name for this is FUD – raising fear, uncertainty and doubt. Today I read FUD in this weeks Travel Weekly (4th Jan 08 edition).

The consultant who wrote the Travel Weekly article was the Chief Executive of Logan Tod – an ecommerce consultancy with a handful of travel industry clients (UK). I quote:

Typically for every 100 visits to a travel website only one or two result in a booking

OK – so far so good. This is a factual statement that is probably about right. If you do your analysis against unique visitors over a month (rather than visits over a month) your conversion percentage could be higher – but this is standard numbers for a “travel website” (no indication if this is a holiday, a commodity or transport product - or leisure or business travel – so quite a general statement as indicated by the word typically)

However, it is the next sentence that wound me up!

Companies cannot allow this situation to continue, especially when part of the solution is so simple 

What?! This makes it sound like everyone with a simple flip of a switch can solve the problem! That must be the power of consultants! Where is this switch? :)

Is low booking conversion really a problem?
One reason why companies can let this situation continue is that conversion is the WRONG measure. Frankly I only care about whether the customer / user, on an individual site visit, achieved their goal when they first arrived on the site. Very few visits to a travel website set out with a goal of buying a product. Many users just want to check availability, undertake destination research, find the customer service contact details etc….. a low booking conversion doesn’t immediately indicate that there is a critical issue with the performance of a website…..

A second reason that I don’t like booking conversion as a metric is that the modern trend on travel websites is to provide more information – and sometimes even community features (like a forum, blog etc) - and this will make your conversion percentage fall. However, I would prefer to convert 2% of 30,000 visits than 4% of 10,000 visits. I wrote about this previously 

Should every travel website search like Kayak.com?

 See Kayak.co.uk for a modern search interface that works better than almost everything else in the industry

Of course, the Travel Weekly article is right – many travel websites can do with a bit of improvement here or there – however I wouldn’t describe the redesign process as simple. Neither would I describe the search process on Kayak.com as the desired design outcome for every single travel website.

For example niche travel companies may want to NOT have a website that looks like they have spent a hundred thousand dollars on it (Kayak will have cost a lot more than that!)….. because maybe the customer is looking for a local operator with specialist knowledge – and customers correlate small companies with having the best product knowledge.

One mistake that I have seen medium sized travel companies make online is to try to make themselves look like a large travel dot com – and end up getting into trouble when they compete with the big beasts - so there are good reasons not to look like Kayak!

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