Lowering Resistance to Internet Travel Purchases

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Minimize My Mouse Clicks

In the interest of simplicity, sometimes travel agency web forms make things more complicated. For instance, on Expedia it does not seem to be possible to pull up all the possible flights between two city pairs. Instead, I must give it my preferred time of travel, and let it do its "We are searching through thousands of records to find the best flights" business. Sometimes when I’m constructing a schedule, I want to know all the possible flights, not the ones the site thinks are most likely. Let me have the data when I want it!

Similarly, some hotel reservations sites make it difficult to quickly find all the hotels in a given area. You may have to know the exact name of the city the hotel happens to fall in; for example, you think it’s in Fort Lauderdale, not Pompano Beach. It should be possible to quickly pull up all the hotels in a metropolitan area (or partial ZIP code) and optionally filter by brand name, amenities, etc.

Tell Me All the Facts!

Northwest’s web site, powered by Expedia, doesn’t reveal the industry standard fare codes for pending or completed ticket purchases. This makes it more difficult for the traveler to find out everything he or she needs to know in some circumstances – for instance, to evaluate whether a purchase qualifies for certain frequent flyer bonuses.

Offer Meaningful Diagnostics when Things Go Wrong

Too many of the travel sites issue the moral equivalent of "Error 404" when you enter invalid information. The better sites give you a new version of the form, with colored, highlit pointers to the fields with problems in them, and a sentence or two explaining what’s wrong and suggesting how you might fix it.

For instance, if you enter an invalid PC number for a discount on Hertz’ reservation site, you get a diagnostic that may not make sense to you. The traveller would feel more comfortable if he or she were told what a PC number looks like, with a facsimile of a typical coupon and the number circled on it.

Keep that Server Online and Responsive!

This one is so obvious it should not require stating, but I have experienced server brownouts and outages on several of the most popular travel service sites.

Server hardware is pretty cheap these days. Even if an agency or airline sizes its servers for the peak load it experiences (say, before a holiday, or on Wednesday morning at 08:00 when the airline posts its Internet-only, super-discounted fares for the weekend) a relatively small investment in horsepower can handle huge loads. After all, if the server is down, customers will pick up the phone and call the 800 number – and those human CSRs cost a lot more per transaction than server hardware would cost.

Every customer who visits an airline or travel agency site and is rebuffed due to server outage is another customer who will be shy about shopping online in the future – or one who turns into another window-shopper who relies on a real human travel agent to make actual purchases.

Engineer for the "Back" Button

Unfortunately, it’s too easy for a customer to confound the transaction. For instance, the customer may:

• Hit the Back button and resubmit a purchase request
• Hit the Esc key, halting a transaction in progress
• After an unexpected browser timeout, hit the Reload key on a transaction screen, and answer "YES!" when the browser says "Repost form data?"
• Open multiple browser windows, and perform a purchase or cancellation transaction on the wrong "session."

Each of these scenarios can cause nasty results, from duplicate purchases to cancelled transactions. Transaction processing is a well-understood concept in computer science, but the Web presents new, somewhat chaotic user interface into a transaction system. Some problems are inevitable. Over time, agencies will gain experience in all the "dumb" things customers might do, and can improve their systems to deal with these problems. For instance, given adequate "state" information embedded in each URL, it should be possible to detect accidental re-issues of a transaction. Judicious use of Javascript or Java could make forms smarter. In the future, the improved forms capability of XML may help out as well.