The independent OTA has managed to maintain its top ten position amongst bigger brands such as Expedia and Lastminute.com, while overtaking well-resourced rivals such as Opodo and Ebookers, in the intervening period, essentially with the same, basic design.

But despite visitors number now having doubled since 2007 and over one million bookings now taken each year, bosses have finally decided to roll out a new design for the site.

The new design is apparently simpler than the previous incarnation, with clearer search tools for its core product range of flights, hotels, packages, car hire and transfers.

The social aspect of the brand is now being pushed to a far greater extent that before, with Facebook and Twitter sharing tools on every product page as well as integration with the TravelRepublic Facebook fan page (see TR Facebook killer story).

Over 250,000 hotel reviews are also given a more prominent position, as well as Google Streetview tools added to product pages.

Apart from moving to a more emotional and modern identity, the objective of the new branding is to position Eurostar as a European train service leader, not just limited to crossing the English Channel.

The deployment is to be completed by 5 April 2011, also with the roll-out of a new website.

The new website is announced to be 20% faster and easier to use, in particular when building multi-segment itineraries beyond the basic London-Paris-Brussels routes.

In a parallel move to airlines, Eurostar will also release new mobile apps including mobile check-in using mobile boarding passes with 2D Aztech codes.

Up until now, the print-at-home PDF boarding passes could technically be displayed on a mobile device and used to go through gates, but it was still mandatory to carry a printed paper copy.

Needless to say, the design community is quite critical about the new logo and branding.

The new logo is designed as a dynamic 3D sculpture of a lowercase “e”, available under different perspectives and even textures like iron, gold, wood or marble.

It’s supposed to represent a fast train passing through a tunnel, which some are seeing as a cartoonish tongue and mouth, and other less innocent metaphores. To others, it reminds them of Internet Explorer with a touch of Coca-Cola!

The main concern is that a 3D sculpture, once flattened down on print, posters and indoor surfaces, loses most of its appeal and creates undue complexity with shading effects.

There is a good dose of personal taste going into branding and design, and I personally like the sense of solidity of the new brand.

Maybe it’s just because I ride on Eurostar weekly, and I need it to remain very solid.

Austrian architects Soehne & Partner has created Code Unique, a new hotel complex in the Dubai Studio City district built – you guessed it – with the QR code running throughout the design and ambience of the property.

Just conceptual at this stage, but given the UAE’s desire to push the boundaries of building design and construction it could indeed eventually make its way into real life, Soehne has used the visual appearance of the QR code for the exterior design as well its block-like form for the dimensions and physical construction.

There are probably no other words that can be used to describe better what Soehne has in mind, so only images will do:

Perhaps in a different age, say in the 1980s and before Dubai’s meteoric growth, a hotel based on the Rubik Cube might well have been a possibility, too.

NB: Images from Soehne & Partners.

So-called GDS “green screens” so beloved by travel agents everywhere, and completely dismissed by just about everyone else, have a great degree of control over the interaction between data sources and the user.

And this is a requirement because the GDS systems designed in the 1950s were born in times when getting any form of functionality in front of a user was a tough thing.

In those days, programmers ruled and users cowered. Functionality was defined by capability rather than by ease of use.

Mainframe-based systems were the order of the day, where scarce computing horsepower and disk space was the constraining factors. Fast forward to today and the world is different.

We have every form of communications interface. Human, virtual human, mobile, character-based, pixel-based etc etc. But what has this done to the core systems?

At the back of everything in air and hotel technologies are some remarkably robust and functional systems. These are rock solid – work 7 x 24 (well, okay, not always in hotels!) and rarely go down.

If and when they do it is usually in a dramatic fashion and in a manner that is immediately seized on by all concerned as a portend of the end of the world.

Yet at the same time all of us experience poor reliable applications on our PCs (Windows or Macs) along with, frankly, appallingly badly written apps on our smartphones that do not work well with the terribly unreliable mobile data connections.

We are perfectly happy to trade off poor quality mobile services for the value of being mobile.

So enter the new user experience. As several of my fellow Tnoozers have written (particularly Martin Collings and Tim Hughes), travel ideation and the interface are key elements of the process of travel.

The user experience for the past 15 years in online travel has changed very little. So there is a real need to revisit the subject area.

In the 1980s and 1990s we used to get excited about GUIs. Even before that the watch word was the acronym WYSIWYG – literally standing for What You See Is What You Get.

I have often spoken about the need for reform with the user interface – about the poor user experience and the need for a new model. In fact, the process of an interface should be as unobtrusive as possible.

Indeed, we should rid the user from the need of an explicit interface, unless they want it.

Hipmunk and Room 77 do a nice job of creating ooohs and aaahs in front of the digerati – however to an old clunker like me, the interface I can see in both of them is not going to improve my personal experience.

I freely admit here that I am not your typical user. I travel more than 250,000 miles a year and am constantly looking at all forms of travel products for both personal and professional reasons.

Consequently I give all the tools a good workout. Neither of these tools do it for me, yet. And they won’t for a while.

The amount of work necessary for Hipmunk to work across a wide range of flights is probably okay for a once in a while occasional flyer/stayer and daydreamer.

For a frequent traveller and a business traveller it lacks a significant level of functionality – not least of which is the element of control.

Room 77 is a product that probably belongs right up there with Second Life. I don’t buy the concept (again yet) of augmented reality and this frankly doesn’t do it for me.

For a very simple set of reasons. The ability to do anything with the information is very limited. Am I going to insist on room 4004 over room 4002? If so, how will I communicate that message to the hotel?

Just imagine the dialogue with the reservation desk when booking the hotel by the phone. Do I hear a lot of sniggering in the background?

Some might draw the conclusion that Room 77′s mission in life is to keep hotel call centres in business!

If I look at the way it works – there are few controls. Counting the ones on the query and the results pages of the new Hipmunk Hotel app, you also have very few choices:

• Input – date, place
• Modification – price, amenities and its info overlays

Hardly earth shattering.

The problem is about the level of nuance. This is the progression of objective definitive statement – eg. the lowest possible price to the next level lowest logical price and then, of course, the highly subjective and unique personal service which is the lowest desirable price.

ITA Software, for example, claims there are hundreds – even thousands – of possible controls, but abstracting that to work is very hard. That statement is based on the assumption that the data elements are discrete and defined and raw.

Hmmm, not the case.

What is missing is an appreciation that the infrastructure powering the current generation of systems has been pushed to its limits.

Indeed I would probably say we may have pushed it too far. We are now suffering from such ailments as poor caching, higher results failures and booking failures. Before anything major can occur we need to look hard at the back-end no matter how nice the front end looks.

These products, such as even the current generation of high-end UEX-led sites, cannot work to their potential without better infrastructure. I liken this to trying to observe a scene using a telescope backwards.

While I may be harsh in my assessment of both these products, I am not completely turned off. They are transitional products on the way to an implicit application, as opposed to an explicit interface.

Thus, if we are going to proceed with fixing some of the infrastructure let’s do it in a smart way whereby we look at the whole end to end workflow.

If we have to go through this step then so be it. I would much prefer to go down the path that products like Portaga attempted to blaze but sadly didn’t get there.

In other words: we need to do a better job of aligning the content acquisition with infrastructure, processing and final the elements of search-based commerce.

We should be thinking about the travel interface and, in particular, the booking process as much as we should be thinking about character spacing on a word processer. Yup not at all.

NB: Here is a presentation to go alongside the article.

Earlier this week, Expedia apologised after a mailshot to subscribers featured a postcard picture of a cathedral in Christchurch, New Zealand, which was severely damaged in the city’s earthquake just a few hours before.

Given the negative press Expedia received after the error, perhaps surprising to see another online travel agency in the region – Wotif – at the centre of another, arguably worse, faux pas.

Users visiting the accommodation search pages on the OTA may have come across a luxury bed and breakfast known as Tangley on Clyde.

Unfortunately, try and look at the price and more information and a pop-up appears with a special offer: “Min 2 mights stay, with this ‘Shaking Good Deal’ you will receive a complimentary gourmet meal with a glass of wine, which is valued at $65 per head.”

“Shaking good deal” is probably not the best turn of phrase given the circumstances, especially as the hotel was damaged in the quake.

When asked about the signage and language, a Wotif official says:

“We have since done a bit of investigating and I have found the deal in question. It was added on the 9 of February by the hotel as an exclusive offer. I believe that the unusual name was purely given as a way of highlighting it at the time. It was removed in the very early hours of this morning by our HQ in Australia and was just a very unfortunate coincidence.”

Once again, such events illustrate that companies should perhaps have some kind of process in place that will search for and eliminate such potentially embarrassing – or even insulting – messaging when tragic events take place.

As for the Tangley on Clyde? The hotel says it came through the devastating events earlier in the week with minimal damage and the owners “look forward to welcoming our guests for the season.”

“We would like to thank all of our guests who have emailed and phoned to check that we are ok and that Tangley has survived the shake.”

As noted at the time, Instant Previews highlights a few issues:

• First impression is everything. If a website looks, well, poorly designed or simply visually unappealing then that may well effect the likelihood of a click by the user.
• Site design will also need to look good in preview form.
• The preview window sometimes (depending on the width of the site) cover the pay-per-click advertising results!

The first and second are relevant right now as Instant Previews is being rolled out quickly across the Google search network.

Early signs from a random sample are that Instant Previews will not portray some sites in a particular good light (with plug-ins and pictures clearly being a bit of an irritant)…

Other sites do not have the same image or plug-in issues but some pages do not look particularly enticing to the user when in preview format.

Luckily, many sites are rendering well enough through the preview panes and some flash-led functionality on pages is coming through into the search results.

In fact, as one web designer quipped this week, many travel sites may actually look better in preview than they do in full screen.

Spotted by Patrick Altoft, director of search at UK-based digital agency Branded3, search results showed a small magnifying glass next to each entry.

Click on the magnifying glass and a large window appears with a preview of the featured web page.

The example above (courtesy of Altoft, with Google Instant switched on) shows a search page for “flights” with a preview of lastminute.com.

Google has truncated the length of the page with a tear-page, presumably because the site layout is reasonably long.

Another example Altoft found for UK fitness centres also featured another box within the window, this time highlighting keywords relevant to the search results.

As always on these occasions, Google says it carries out tests of different functionality across its network – as yet there is no official blog post about the preview window.

There is no indication as yet where the previews are being pulled from, but presumably from a recently cached version of the site – something Google is able to do much better these days since the launch of Chrome.

So, some quick points to mull over:

• First impression is everything. If a website looks, well, poorly designed or simply visually unappealing then that may well effect the likelihood of a click by the user.
• Site design will perhaps need to look good in preview form.
• The preview window sometimes (depending on the width of the site) covers pay-per-click advertising results!

The site has abandoned the former busy homepage to a simpler search and include only core functionality for the service.

Most of the additional information about hostels, destinations, booking information pages, editorial content and social features is now either buried further down the homepage or in other channels within the site.

The relaunch of the site follows the company’s ten-year anniversary and parent company Web Reservations International‘s sale to private equity firm Hellman and Friedman in November 2009 for a rumoured Euro 200 million.

Other new functionality includes an overhauled map search tool to include detailed information about every property in a particular city such as ratings, pictures and reviews.

The latest consumer usability survey from the well-respected eDigitalResearch was extended to cover 45 different UK travel sites – and has some surprising results.

Topping the poll – conducted among 1,261 consumers in February 2010 to test elements such as first impression, search functionality, booking and customer service – were Premier Inn, Virgin Holidays and the strike-riddled British Airways.

Across all sectors in the study – airlines, hotels and accommodation sites, OTAs, cruise and cross-channel providers – the study found that first impressions, initial research and search procedure scored well.

The presentation of results saw a dip in satisfaction amongst those carrying out the survey, but positive responses were given for the booking process.

However, respondents were generally less satisfied with how websites handle customer service issues, with airlines performing particularly poorly.

The final table of top 45 websites – which didn’t see any site perform lower than 64% and the Premier Inn scoring 80% – was created using an aggregated score across the individual user disciplines.

1. Premier Inn
2. Virgin Holidays
3. British Airways
4. Expedia (hotels)
5. Booking.com
6. Expedia (OTA)
7. SeaFrance
8. First Choice
9. Opodo and Brittany Ferries
10. =
11. Eurotunnel
12. Keycamp and Thomson Flights
13. =
14. The Co-Operative Travel
15. P&O Ferries
16. Monarch
17. Hayes & Jarvis
18. Stena Line, Fred Olsen and Mr & Mrs Smith
19. =
20. =
21. Eurocamp
22. Ebookers and Virgin Atlantic
23. =
24. Thomas Cook
25. Thistle
26. Hotels.com
27. Thomson Holidays
28. Lastminute.com (hotels)
29. Royal Caribbean Cruises
30. Lastminute.com (OTA)
31. Eurostar
32. Princess Cruises
33. P&O Cruises
34. Kuoni
35. Celebrity Cruises
36. Travel Republic
37. Flybe
38. Hilton
39. BMIBaby
40. Travelodge
41. De Vere
42. Cunard
43. Holiday Inn
44. EasyJet
45. Ryanair

The ad launched on Monday this week on a number of leading Scottish commercial channels in prime and off-peak time slots and will run until mid-February before officials at the metasearch site decide whether to extend elsewhere.

The agency behind the ad – featuring two plane spotters discussing aircraft and fares at the end of a runway – is Edinburgh-based Newhaven, with media buying by FeatherBrooksbank.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1-nf9VlcCA

Skyscanner’s ad marks a return to TV advertising for the UK metasearch sector following the mammoth campaign from rival site TravelSupermarket in 2007, ahead of its floatation on the London Stock Exchange with parent company MoneySupermarket.

It is not the only metasearch to bring in a well-respected marketing guru and see a switch to TV advertising.

US site Kayak launched its controversial TV ads for the US market in October 2009, six months after hiring Robert Birge as its chief marketing officer.

UPDATE: Skyscanner probably decided not to use this experimental effort from September 2009.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzGxBwBXlEw

Here is some advice for the customer service challenged.

Travel and self service should be made for each other.

In most cases they are. However there is a significant disconnect of what to do when a user reaches a problem/issue that he cannot resolve himself.

On average – and I am not quite a typical user – I hit the “Contact Us” button on a website at least once a day only to be very frustrated.

Well, I used to think that maybe I was special but apparently not so.

I am also not the only person who gets frustrated, according to iPerceptions. I have used the iPerceptions study material before and found it to be a mine of information.

The latest study on Q2 data was released last month. There are some very interesting nuggets that we can digest from this.

One of these relate to the issue of educating the user – subject matter I have written on before – the successful ecommerce site must understand that it cannot just ignore the education part of the process.

An educated user is a better user.

I can recall from the early days of Expedia one characteristic we found was that early users who successfully managed a transaction were both good evangelists for the product and were highly likely to do it again in the near future.

What we didn’t address at the time because there was so much low hanging fruit was the people who started down the purchase path and then abandoned the process.

So for me the other part is more interesting, namely the corollary to a successful transaction.

In a business that has a horrendous Look to Book ration, we need to understand the reasons for abandonment.

Sadly the data in the iPerceptions report doesn’t address what I believe is a specific issue for our industry – ie that we (site owners) force users into the purchase path in order to verify the offer information.

This is a good way – sometimes the only way for the consumer to validate the exact request.

Of course, search doesn’t work like this and hence the disconnect in the way we handle our customers.

We need to do a much better job here to give the user a sense of confidence that what he is seeing is real and actually there so he doesn’t tie up resources in the purchase part for which he HAS NO INTENTION OF COMPLETING.

Further we need to do something for the user that when he starts down the purchase path – for real or just for information – that we can provide to him an easy way to get the information that he needs when he most needs it.

Let me give you some examples:

If I get stuck, I need a place to go. The chaps at smart agent software companies using either robotic software like NextIT’s Smart Agent know this to be true and Alaska and now Continental Airlines have successfully deployed it.

It reduces the amount of unsuccessful transactions, but that is the problem – only part.

A full service transaction needs a tool like live chat (from something like LiveAgent) or a telephone number to respond more personally and completely to the site customers’ needs for information.

So my site shameful issues are three fold:

• Sites don’t make the availability of support information easy to get to. It’s almost NEVER contextual
• Access to a reasonable FAQ or interface for Q&A that provides a way for me to help myself is sorely lacking in all but a few sites
• If this fails there is nothing that irks a user if he cannot get to a person to solve his problem.

What ecommerce companies seem to miss is that an educated user is your best evangelist. The disdained customer is the one who is going to be vocal to his personal and online social network.

Is there a remedy for this?

An emphatic yes and don’t be afraid to deploy a solution mix.

Whether you are big or small – you can do this and build value to your brand.

The ability to interleave customer service with social media demands these type of capabilities. So my advice to you is as follows:

1. Stop creating useless help pages and make the help resource useful and reachable. Also lessen the complexity and reduce the sheer volume of content to support help. Also MAKE SURE you have a good search engine to find the help. Lord help me if this isn’t one of the worst areas of online for Travel or any other category
2. Deploy a self help tool that is like Ask Jen on the Alaska site. All it does is act as an interface to the data you can already see explicitly in other part of the site
3. Don’t be afraid to deploy a chat or call center solution. And its OK – it doesn’t have to be 24 hours. It can be at set times. Just set the expectation simply and clearly.

And finally PLEASE don’t piss me off with the following:

1. Don’t make me enter my data again or repeat it to you – I don’t care why you do it – it demonstrates how much you just don’t care for me or my needs.
2. Always follow through on what you can do – or be clear that you cannot. It is OK to just say no. I will hate you if you lie to me or make me jump through hoops only to find that there was nothing you could have done in the first place…

So please do this, and make users like me happy. I will reward you with my business.

But it is probably worth applying the same scrutiny to search engines.

Until reasonably recently, firing in the search term “hotel new york” on Google, for example, would see organic results taking up the vast majority of top half of the page, displayed alongside paid-for AdWords in a narrow right-hand navigation bar.

Not any more.

The addition of maps has fundamentally changed the make-up of search results – so much so that all the inventory above the fold is commercially supported.

So while many will see this as a natural inevitability of Google’s creeping commercialisation, does it effect how users interact with natural results or increase the apparent relevancy or perceived reliability of paid-for links?

Some more on this subject here from SEO Book.

Inspired by an article on the CXBlog, which explores The Myth of the Page Fold: Evidence from User Testing, Tnooz wants to gauge the opinions of readers – and not just UEs and designers – as to where current thinking lies on the issue of placing content and functionality above or below the screen “fold”.

As CX explains, the fold is “commonly used on the web to describe the area you see on a web page before you have to scroll down the page”.

Opinions differ depending on the type of site, especially in travel, where some are focused primarily on booking generation or inspiration.

Thinking specifically about the homepage with the red line indicating the page fold, ponder the travel examples below (and other sites) and add your comments.

The airline’s core market in the UK will be the first to see a spruced-up homepage ahead of other new features being added on a regular basis over the coming months.

Users of its country sites elsewhere will notice a switch shortly, say staff working on the project.

Virgin appears to have followed the current trend for giving over significant parts of its homepage real estate to a carousel for strong images depicting its destinations and for flogging promotions.

The carrier is also demonstrating  that the SEO department does indeed talk to the those putting the design brief together (VA has a long-standing relationship with EMC Conchango).

Users coming in via search links or PPC ads will find the carousel set up to feature content related to their search, such as pictures of New York, Orlando etc.

Elsewhere the lead search facility on the homepage was also cleaned up and some new features added to the vertical navigation bars.

Virgin says the look and feel from the homepage will be pushed to other pages over time. All changes will be A-B tested – similar to the recent stealth testing – beforehand.

Despite the presence of EMC at the Virgin VJam Day last year, which attracted plenty of attention in the design and social media community, there are no plans to implement anything substantial from the day into the ongoing development work for the site.

However, Virgin says curiously that some offline initiatives may emerge from the pow-wow which took place in London.