About Valamar: large hospitality company in Croatia
Valamar is one of the largest hospitality companies in Croatia. With a total of 40 hotels and other properties the company owns about 10% of the accommodation capacity in the country. More company information can be found on their website.
Assignment: increase the booking conversion
The travel industry is an industry known for its fierce competition. Therefore, it is important for Valamar to continuously improve the online activities.
On the Valamar website, the booking engine is one of the most important elements. Consequently, Valamar asked User Intelligence to assess their booking engine to look for changes that would increase the conversion rate of this booking funnel.
Method: Combined Review and Web Traffic Map
In order to find improvements for the booking engine, User Intelligence conducted an Expert Review in combination with Web Analytics. This is also known as a Combined Review. More information about the combination of Web Analytics and User Research methods can be found in this presentation. As planned, the Combined Review gave a list of improvements, which was presented in an interactive session with the online team of the client (see illustration below).
However, what makes the Valamar case even more interesting is that we also made a Web Traffic Map. This is a simple (usually one-page) deliverable for communicating and exposing the problem areas of a website. It serves as a visual management summary of your websites performance (see illustration below).
The reason for making a Web Traffic Map is that a list of improvements is not enough. We also had to make sure that the organization was ‘buying into’ the improvements, otherwise the booking conversion would never increase!
Obviously, we could have sent the Combined Review report to the board of Valamar. However, this presentation was aimed at discussing the finding with the online team of the client and contained a lot of details. This made it too time-consuming and difficult to interpret for the board. Therefore, we also made a report that summarized the findings and showed them in a very compelling way: the Web Traffic Map. This made it a lot easier for the board to see the business case for implementing the suggested changes.
Results: improvements, communication, and implementation
The most important finding of the combined review was a major fall-out rate during the first few steps in the booking funnel. The reason was that visitors were pushed to book an accommodation too early, while still being in the information gathering stage.
Through visualization of the booking funnel in the Web Traffic Map it was immediate clear to the Valamar organization what was going wrong and what should be done. The most important result of this project was therefore that Valamar will make a more explicit separation in the website flow between information gathering and booking.
The implementation of this separation is currently in progress. The expectation of Valamar and User Intelligence is that this change (and other, smaller changes) will lead to a significantly higher conversion rate. Once the new website is live, the web data will show the end result of the project.
Is your website functioning optimal?
The Combined Review and Web Traffic Map helped Valamar to optimize their website. Are you curious about what User Intelligence can do to optimize your website? Please feel free to contact us!