10 things about Cruise Prices Compared.com

So – another detailed review. This time let us take a look at a new cruise deal price-comparison / meta-agent site – CruisePricesCompared.com

I say “meta agent” because rather than sending through bookings to suppliers, customers are sent through to agents to complete the transaction. This is similar in style to travel.co.uk that I reviewed 2 days ago – although travel.co.uk is a much neater solution all round.

5 things I like

The founder has built and launched something rather than just talking about it

Well done to Harley Van Stratten. There are many agents who mope around complaining about what the web is doing to their business – but Harley has successfully launched a novel website to defend against what he sees as a growing problem. To quote Harley

Each month the money agents earn from cruise sales is being eroded because competition is pushing prices down. Agents are having to discount to compete and that means they can’t afford to advertise. On cruisepricescompared.com, they can advertise for free, which means they can start increasing their margins because they are not paying distribution costs

I agree that cruise is going to be a competitive sector in the next couple of years. Traditional agents who ran for shelter by specialising in cruise sales (because traditional tour packages had moved online) may find cruise isn’t such an attractive place to be after all. I am sure Harley is aiming to help these agents maintain market share.

Not being run from a yacht or pretending to be a super hero

Yesterday you may remember I reviewed SoCruise – a new cruise social network that is also going after the cruise deals sector (in the UK). SoCruise are now (in)famous for promoting themselves using super heroes and by saying they intend to run their business (now with 5 employees) from 2 yachts in Ibiza. Is that what SoCruise’s 250,000 EUR seed funding was spent on?

The meta-agent model

I like the meta-agent model….. but I have gone on about this too much already this week (in the travel.co.uk review). But its still a positive for the Cruise Prices Compared.com site.

I like the model enough to respect it but it isn’t one I would follow if I were doing a startup. It is too much of a “better candlesticks” approach…. when I am personally interested in electricity (i.e. its an improvement on an old model – rather than anything new)

Sorry – just have 3 things I like today. No refunds available.

5 things I don’t like

Video auto start

The homepage has a video slot in the top right hand corner. This will be available “for rent” to any advertiser. That is fine – I just wish they would turn auto-start off (especially as the homepage is the only page with the search on – so when you navigate around the site – you have to come back to that page often – and the video starts playing every time).

An alternative to turning the auto-start off is to make it start with the volume off on subsequent visits to the page (using a cookie). That is probably the most elegant way of solving the problem.

Colours

The blues and reds are really pretty bright and not very relaxing (as a cruise holiday should be)

But what is worse is that the blue is the same colour as hyperlinked text…. OK – I am not a designer – so I won’t get into the ins and outs of colour choices – but suffice to say – I don’t like the colours.

Pages are too wordy

This website has too many words and not enough bullet points.

Words are a funny thing on websites as they are both informative and are a core part of the user interface. It is far too easy to have too many of them.

One skill that many smaller (and larger) websites don’t tend to bring in to a website project is a dedicated copywriter. Copywriters, although they tend to be expensive, can do amazing things with words. Use them.

[Website projects undertaken by web design agencies are, in my experience, much more likely to use dedicated copywriters. Agencies understand how to create a team of all the talents, especially larger agencies]

Advertising model & not enough “other content”

The only content on this site is the cruise deal content – plus a rather weird page about how cruise is one of the best kept secrets in the travel industry.

This makes me wonder how they are going to make their business model work. Their suggested model is that all traffic is freely given to cruise selling agents…. i.e. an agent can come along, load up some products and receive traffic. No money to be made from agents there then.

But without lots of other pages – there just won’t be sufficient page impressions to make enough advertising income to cover either the operational costs of the site – or marketing the site to consumers.

The B2C marketing will cost a great deal of money. To quote:

Where there are adverts for cruising, we will advertise too

Marketing to agents will also cost money….. 

Obviously I haven’t seen their numbers – but in my experience to make sensible advertising income you really need thousands of pages all pulling their weight.

My advice would be either to move to a PPC model with the agents – or introduce a “nominal” monthly charge to be able to upload as many deals as you like. For an advertiser there is little difference between free and nominal – but people paying a small fee a month will actually care more about what kind of deals they are loading into the system. Quality will go up.

Search

Lets start with the basics

• Use GET not POST – so that the back button still works (and you can get back from a single result to the main results page)
• Vertical spacing – tighten it all up so you can get the data above the fold on a 1024 x 768 screen

I could go on and on about the search. This is the key part of the site – but it isn’t really quite right yet. 

My main concern about the search though is how the situation with multiple agents all loading a deal for the same cruise is going to be handled. Will the deals be grouped by cruise?

This really stems from the problem of not taking PPC advertising from the agents - if they were then deals from the top bidding agent could be shown against that specific cruise (or top two or whatever).

I would be interested to know how they intend to solve this – otherwise with, say, 100 cruise agents all loading offers there will be duplication between cruises…. the user interface will not really stand up to that kind of pressure – and users just won’t use the system as it will be unwieldy.

Final thought about these reviews

I only do these “10 things” reviews for new travel websites that have issued press releases about something or other. If you don’t want your site to go under the musings microscope – don’t send out a press release until you are ready.

Personally, I wouldn’t issue a press release on day #1 of a new website…… leave it a few weeks until you have got some private feedback from various people and managed to incorporate as much as you can into the next iteration. Then you can tell the world about your new site.

Finally, see also the Travolution blog – who are running an open thread where you can post what you think about the site….. CruisePricesCompared open thread

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