Blog home1 am and up against all sorts of project deadlines making whooshing noises as they fly past me….. so don’t have a great deal of time to write much this week (especially as the people the projects are for read this blog - and if they see me writing too much they will ask why I am not focussing on their stuff!)
So here is a quick little challenge for you. I have grouped some leading travel websites into 3.
Within each group they are also ranked in order…
Group A
- Travel.yahoo.com
- TripAdvisor.com
- Hotels.com
Group B
- Expedia.com
- Priceline.com
- Travelocity.com
- Laterooms.com
- Lastminute.com
Group C
- Kayak.com
- Dohop.com
- Cheapflights.com
- Ebookers.com
- Boo.com
- Cheaptickets.com
- Hotwire.com
- Orbitz.com
Incidentally, in my subjective opinion being at the top of group A is better than being at the bottom of Group C. Actually Orbitz is struggling on my criteria…. I would be interested to see if my single, objective, criteria correlates with traffic or revenue….
So the challenge is - what objective measurement have I used to rank these websites? Any ideas? (I will write another post about it when you guys have had your guesses!)
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hey Alex, be kind, I just come back from vacation !
Well, I don’t see the magic link in your group rank
Waiting your next post
best regards
Claude
Hi Alex,
All the sites in Group A have 2 column layouts
I am guessing it has something to do with engagement - both Travel.yahoo.com and TripAdvisor.com feature UGC (or at least links to it) prominently on the first page. However Hotels.com doesn’t, so I’m out.
Cheers,
Gath
Hi Claude and Gath
Nope…. neither of those are right….. thanks for trying though!
I have now published the answer on this page travel website page count
A couple of potential groupings come to mind….
If you just swapped Expedia and priceline, they would be ranked by EBITA.
If you moved Priceline into the bottom of group A, they would be ranked by technology cap ex as a percent of sales
Group A tends to use pop-up ads (which I hate), Group C uses pop-under ads (which I hate, but a little less), and Group C doesn’t use either tactic, but this obviously isn’t your criteria.
based upon your previous posts, you have neither a business, nor strategy background, which removes a significant number of potential groupings. You have some primitive understanding of usability and web design, which is where I’m guessing you are focused here. Given that you don’t talk about attitudinal vs. behavioral characteristics, anthropological insights, or other common UI charactersitics, it’s eaither a simplistic measure, or archane technical usage (like cookies, or ajax)
sooo…..
I’m gussing you used home page weight (download size) as your criteria. The smaller the better in your head, right?