travel tech insights

Everyone knows the old saying you can’t judge a book by it’s cover, but at the same time everyone knows the importance of making a positive first impression. It’s a paradox that relies solely judging a book by it’s cover, but it’s a paradox we live with on a daily basis and one that travel companies must reckon with when it comes to their web presence and the responsiveness of their website.

Imagine: You log on to a travel company’s website to research a destination or complete a booking and the site takes seemingly forever to load. Images don’t display properly, text is difficult to read, and drop-down bars and navigation tabs don’t function and impede your ability to move through the site. You try to access the same site later from a smartphone and tablet and encounter the same issues again, only this time their magnified because the site is not equipped to handle mobile interfacing. Frustrated with this experience, you ditch this website in favor of a competitor which offers a more simple, clean web-based interaction.

This is what is meant by a responsive website: a website design that recognizes a visitor’s device, changes page configurations for best viewing, and is capable of displaying with optimal functionality across all spectrums of devices - desktop, laptop, tablet, and more.

Who are the millennials and why are they important to your travel business? It’s certainly no problem finding articles identifying millennials by the numbers: did you know they check their smartphone 45 times a day, and are 50+% more likely to ditch search engines and email in favor of social networks to find brand content? Or that 44% of them praise or flame product and services experiences with text messages and 38% of them use social media to do the same?

In fact, millennials are a widely diverse group, and any implication it can be accurately characterized by various data points is misleading.Demographically speaking, the group is defined as those born between 1980 and 2000 – or 15 to 35 years old. Does any doubt fifteen year old girls check smart phones 45 times a day? Does anyone believe 35 year old men do the same? The age band is simply too broad to support general  assumptions about specific behaviors, not to mention it also covers the span in which people mature to adulthood: young adolescents go into the group and mature adults come out.

The Web can be a magical place: your company launches its website and over the course of weeks and months transactions begin to take place with people you’ve never heard of, from places you’ve never been. Soon you find yourself spending long hours exploring ways to build site traffic: SEO concepts and terms from Google analytics become a familiar part of your vocabulary. After months of steady effort momentum builds and a steady upward trend emerges. But not so for sales; revenue consistently lags behind projections. An inbound marketing firm is brought in and reports the conversion rate for website traffic is 1.5% - and calls it good news because it’s so close to the travel industry average of 1.6%. It sure doesn’t seem like good news, does it?

The benefits of a responsive travel website are so compelling there’s no point in even trying to make the case companies in the travel industry can succeed without one. No doubt some are trying, but they’ve put themselves in roughly the same position as a brick-and-mortar store operating with inconvenient parking and accepting just one type of credit card. Perhaps some succeed in the short term, but those companies suffer an economic loss from missed profits. Since a website with responsive design is one that recognizes a visitor’s device and changes page configurations for best viewing, it stands to reason a nonresponsive site can never achieve the same user experience.