by Steve McGowan

It has hopefully not escaped your attention that VYRE is something of a web travel specialist. We certainly make no attempt to hide it and are always up for a chat about our work with companies such as Virgin Holidays, Icelandair, and Inghams Travel.  

In fact at the moment we are preparing a new webinar on the subject which you will be able to view at www.vyre.com

Consequently, as a New Business person, and therefore  of a naturally sunny disposition I like to keep abreast of all that is good and lovely in the world of online travel.  However, I also know that there is another side to the story and that we and our clients need to be aware of and learn from it.

So I have spent some useful, if somewhat depressing hours, this week, looking for disparaging comments on travel websites; what people hate rather than what they love.

There is no shortage of material I can assure you. A single visit to www.travelrant.com gave me plenty of food for thought, and this was backed up by a huge variety of independent blogs and forums in the same vein of invective.

What's interesting is that the main issues all seem to centre on peoples experience of searching on travel sites.

I have tried here to distil the comments to the five main search related bugbears:

• Searching for deals that are advertised but don't exist - Whether this happens as a deliberate and cynical tactic to lure people deeper into your site or whether it is a genuine shortcoming of the dynamic nature of your web platform, it can get right up people's noses and backfire badly.
• Making a search and on trying to go back even one step, losing the whole criteria. This may be a technical shortcoming or just a design fault but it is something that users find extremely irritating. Anything in web world that creates even the slightest repetition or delay is disproportionately irritating to us these days.
• Slow searching on slow websites - Of course this may be attributable in cases to a user's own connectivity issues but increasingly less so and the onus is on tour operators to provide the best performance experience or risk losing traffic and conversions.
• Completing a search with all details, including that absolute requirement for a waterbed and kid's dinosaur themed water park only to hit the button and find that it is no longer available. Dead end. Should not your system be able to highlight the dead end earlier or simply not be publishing that holiday at all? As a minimum the searcher (potential customer remember) should be offered relevant alternatives. The important word here being 'relevant'. Somebody who has just spent 15 minutes programming in details for a family holiday to Greece is not interested in suddenly switching it to a singles walking tour of historically interesting nudist beaches.
• Predictive Searches. People are irritated by those sites (not the norm thankfully) that 'helpfully' tick all sorts of extras that they are sure you will want to have, even though they carry extra charges: insurance, car hire etc. Users want the choice to opt in whilst searching and not to have to double check everything in order to opt out.

The list I filtered to was personal to my own worst favourites (is that even a phrase?) and I was pleased to find our client sites free of pretty much all of them. I'd like to think that we and the VYRE Unify content management platform has something to do with that but in any case I'd be really interested to learn of your own thoughts and see if we can't add to the list.

Likewise if you are in the business I'd love to hear what steps you have taken to avoid these or other issues.

A final thought - As new research by BDRC Continental proved - 42% of people use travel websites first for holiday information and those people will on average visit 6 websites in their search. It could not be more important to tour operators to get this thing right.  

Now where was that historical walking tour trip again?