Blog homeTime for another detailed review….. lets take a look at travel.co.uk, a new website that “takes travel comparison shopping to a new level”. Its a UK based site selling mainly package holidays (at the moment) but with the intention to move into wider product sectors later.
5 things I like
Choose your booking agent and choose your holiday
This website isn’t just about choosing product - but you can choose who you are going to book with. The website takes no part in the commercial transaction between the customer and the agent.
You should be aware that none of the products and services that appear on the Site are provided by us. They are provided by third parties over whom we have no control. You should satisfy yourself that you wish to purchase these products or services before contracting with those third parties. The third party providers will be supplying products and services on their own standard terms and conditions which can be found on the booking forms for the relevant product or service on the Site.
This makes a change from most online travel agency websites which tend to be about sending customers direct to suppliers.
Support for the Travel Trust Association (TTA)
Interestingly they are also taking TTA bonded agents. Great news for the smaller travel companies out there.
Shortlist
A quick view of your shortlisted items….. and you can drag and re-order….
And you can compare items in your shortlist side by side:
Only negative on the shortlist is that the cookie seems to be session based - so if you close your browser and revisit the site - the shortlist is gone (Virgin Holidays, for example, maintain an unsaved shortlist even if you close your browser)
Calendar
A nice calendar with price bar chart below:
However I selected the £171 price for the 9th of July…. and a popup comes up. In the modal popup an AJAX call goes and checks availability for that date / price combination.
While it is checking I can see full details of the product (above - and notice in the top right it says checking availability) - but then - without any warning - because the product is unavailable - the page refreshes to a page saying nothing available:
Ummm…. maybe I don’t like this date checking system after all!
They need to make the “unavailable” message appear on the details page - because otherwise I could have started to interact with the page - and be shocked when it fully refreshes to negative message. The user should be left in control of their experience….
The domain name
Yep - travel.co.uk is a pretty nice name.
5 things I don’t like
Spelling of accommodation
One of my pet peeves on travel websites is seeing the word accommodation misspelt. It really winds me up. Unfortunately travel.co.uk have fallen into this trap.
I am sure they will fix this in a jiffy!
Not clear enough benefits between one agent and another
While I like the concept of being able to select between different booking agents, I can’t see the benefits of one over another clearly enough.
The text describing the agency profile is too wordy - and too generic. Of course everyone is independent, of course everyone has experience - blah blah blah blah blah.
…. and price distinction between booking agents doesn’t help either…..
[Shows detail of Agent 1 vs Agent 2]
Minor point for the designers…. a potential usability issue here…. the page on the site is for selecting a different booking agent - but I read it initially as choose a booking agent - so I overlooked that a default booking agent had already been selected. My fix would be to repeat the defaulted booking agent in the “choose a different booking agent for this holiday” box.
Popup hell
Navigating around the site you end up with all sorts of modal / non-modal popups that contain core functionality and product details. Certainly this isn’t accessible but it may also be a problem for less than expert web users. Yes its funky and new - but tried and tested traditional user interface design works for a reason.
About us page not clear about not being responsible for bookings
The quote I listed above was from the terms & conditions. The T&Cs make it quite clear that travel.co.uk is not part of the transaction between the customer and the booking agent - however other pages don’t.
Yes on the homepage it says “booking direct with the company of your choice, right here on this site” - but this is easily missed….. and could easily be confused with booking with a supplier direct rather than booking with an agent direct.
I have a feeling this is going to cause all sorts of customer service issues down the road - and resulting bad press - unless they clearly define the proposition and explain it better to consumers.
While we are talking about the About us page - its about five times too long. No one will read what is probably one of the most important pages on the site. [People coming via online marketing will select a product, and just prior to the purchase decision, read the about us page in order to find out more about the company, and then go back to their product and book - if they were not upset by anything they read]
Help is unhelpful
The help is stuck in a tiny popup. What makes it worse is that you have a tiny scroll bar to move the help information up and down….. and the web designers have made the popup size locked (resizable=0) so even if I wanted to make the popup larger I can’t.
Frankly the help popup is pretty rubbish.
Summary
I am being tough on this site because it has been put together by one of the leading travel technology companies - and a leading travel website design team. They should (and could) be doing much better than this.
Maybe in 3 months the site will be great - but at the moment there is still a great deal of sandpapering to do - and a few redesigns required as well. No awards for this one yet. Luckily the awards season - and UK peak sales period for package holidays (January / February / March) - is still some way away!
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