With the ever-increasing proliferation of smartphones and tablets, mobile internet access and apps, consumers are becoming much more comfortable with browsing and shopping through the mobile.

As a result, many business sectors are having to really push forward their multi-channel strategy and approach to mobile, and travel is one of these.

There is one area of importance potentially above all others when it comes to successful mobile engagement – the experience.

Consumers have very personal relationships with their mobile devices, so it becomes even more crucial than on other digital channels, that the user experience is right and that the recipient is engaged with on their terms.

At Webcredible, we have been doing a lot of consultancy around the mobile user experience and have recently been working a lot within the travel sector.

A recent customer was Hotels.com, which wanted to optimise its mobile offering in line with customer requirements with the further aim of producing results that would improve brand experience, customer satisfaction and loyalty through the mobile channel.

This is a common problem, for many travel brands when looking to make moves in mobile.

The approach to mobile will differ according to the brand itself, but there are some best practice tips that travel brands can follow when looking to optimise the mobile experience for their customers.

1. Reduce the amount of content

Not everything shown on a PC site can fit reasonably onto a mobile web page, where space is short and every pixel counts.

It’s important to reduce the amount of content shown on the mobile-optimised version. Only include the most important content or features.

2. Use single column layouts

Website pages are difficult to view on small mobile phone screens. Even on smartphones like the iPhone with their relatively large screens, standard web pages load up zoomed out so that they can fit on the screen.

Instead, create single column pages that use up the whole width of the screen.

To add additional content the page should expand downwards rather than across, as scrolling down is easier than scrolling across and users generally prefer it.

3. Present the navigation differently

It’s difficult to fit the navigation across the top of the screen on a mobile web page, therefore you must look for alternative options to display the navigation.

A few options include:

• Place the navigation and site search at the top of the page and leave the content for later pages. This is suitable for users who want to navigate or search upon immediately finding the site – a common action with travel websites
• Place the navigation at the bottom – still accessible but doesn’t get in the way of the content
• Place the navigation in a dropdown link at the top of the page

4. Minimise text entry

Text entry on a mobile phone is much more difficult than when using a desktop or laptop keyboard, so mobile websites must take this into account.

Allowing users to store details in their “My Account” section is helpful, and if they already have an online account, then linking this to them as a mobile user will also avoid any unnecessary text entry.

5. Decide whether you need more than one mobile site

If your mobile website is only going to be seen by smartphone users with fast download speeds then one mobile version will be ok.

However, if you want a broader reach then you should consider creating a paired down version. Facebook goes as far as having three main mobile versions.

6. Take advantage of inbuilt functionality

Many mobile phones have an advantage over PCs – they come with lots of inbuilt functionality that most PCs don’t have.

You can make it easier for users to perform certain tasks by utilising a mobile’s inbuilt functionality and thereby remove the need for manual steps, for example; making calls, seeing an address on a map and finding the nearest.

However, although these kind of best practice guidelines can help with some ‘quick wins’ for your mobile proposition, travel brands must ensure that their mobile strategies are based on real insights into the behaviours and needs of their audiences and target markets through the customer lifecycle.

Live example

In the case of Hotels.com, Webcredible worked to gain more of an understanding of smartphone users’ use of mobile sites and applications (and any other activity) to guide the development of its mobile website and iPhone and Android apps.

The main objectives of the research was to learn:

How people use smartphones in relation to researching, planning and booking travel
How smartphones are used by travellers while they travel to their destination and how they’re used during holidays and business trips
What are the current barriers that prevent some users from travel-related smartphone use

We used diary study methods, interviews and expert analysis projects, along with its mobile industry knowledge and integrated research, to produce a set of guidelines and recommendations for Hotels.com to build its mobile strategy, which were detailed in a report which:

• Mapped smartphone use against the travel lifecycle
• Updated existing personas to include smartphone use
• Highlighted current attitudes and behaviours towards arranging hotels, flights, meals entertainment and other activities across digital channels
• Reported on how smartphones are being used to store travel-related information
• Discussed current barriers to using smartphones for bookings
• Offered ideas and suggestions for future smartphone opportunities

The importance of a mobile optimised website cannot be underestimated in the travel industry.

When online, if a user struggles to complete a task on your website, they are very likely to simply “drop-off” and go to a competitor’s site.

With the increase in speed of mobile devices and connections, this type of behaviour will become increasingly prevalent on mobile devices as well and travel brands need to ensure they’re providing a mobile user experience that seamlessly matches the online experience, making it easy for consumers to complete the tasks they want, when they want, through whichever platform they want.

NB: This is a guest article by Trenton Moss, director at UK-based Webcredible.

Explaining the origins of the redesign, Paul English, Kayak co-founder and chief technology officer, says Kayak has a semi-independent iPhone team, working under the supervision of Bill O’Donnell, chief architect and general manager of Kayak Mobile.

The team was operating on a “parallel track” with the rest of the company and charged with “ignoring Kayak a bit,” English says.

And, spurring the changes, Kayak’s iPhone app and especially its iPad app turned into a better user experience than Kayak.com, English says.

So with 10 million downloads of Kayak’s various apps in their back pockets, the Kayak mobile team set out to develop an iPad-influenced redesign of Kayak.com which is simple and clean, with lots of white space and attractive images, English says.

One of the most dramatic changes can be seen when viewing the redesigned hotel photos pages on Kayak.com. Here’s a photo of the page for the Four Seasons Hotel Denver:

You’ll notice, when compared with the previous hotel photos pages, the image is dominant and iPad-like. It has a black backdrop instead of white space, and the hotel address and map are now gone. Here’s an image of a previous hotel page design:

And, here’s a “before” and “after” look at Kayak.com’s hotel home pages. You’ll notice a much less-cluttered look, with the flights, hotels, cars and deals tabs trimmed (there is no longer a vacations tab shown in this view) and they are migrated to the top of the page instead of in the left-hand column. Here is the previous view:

And, here’s the redesigned Kayak hotel home page:

Look how far website design — and Kayak.com’s in particular –has evolved since the following image from February 2005 when Kayak came out of beta:

In introducing today’s redesign, Kayak went for a minimalist approach, hiding the little-used amenities search filter on hotel pages, as well as inconvenient flights and duplicate codeshares, says Giorgos Zacharia, Kayak’s chief scientist.

And, the decisions about which features to keep, hide or delete were not random, but were the result of user tests in a Kayak UI experience lab in the company’s tech offices in Concord, Massachusetts.

Kayak brought in consumers — some Kayak users and some not — drawn from different demographic profiles and with a camera hooked up to their monitors, Kayak studied, among other things, how their eyes moved on the page. Engineers and designers were keenly interested in which features users looked at, in what order, and which ones they ignored.

In another room, English explains, Kayak engineers using a “giant” $30,000 computer monitor, could calibrate users’ actions, from mouse to eye movements, and then fine-tune the redesign based on little-used or never-glanced-at features on a page.

The aim of the redesign, English says, was to introduce a universal color palette, simplify logos and typefaces, and incorporate more white space, all for a cleaner, more user-friendly experience.

Kayak event went so far as to introduce new specs and guidelines for display ads on Kayak.com so the color palettes of display ads mesh with the website’s color scheme and won’t shock the user.

For example, here’s a Hotwire display ad which meets the specs of the Kayak redesign:

And, here’s a Hotwire ad before the redesign:

Kayak, which makes much of its money on advertising, also previously ran a link under each display ad, giving users the option to hide it.

Not many users actually did so, English says, adding, “It was not a big drag on revenue.”

But, in the interest of simplicity, the redesigned Kayak.com now has only one link per page giving users the option of hiding all of the display ads instead of displaying such a link under each ad.

It will be in the eye of the beholder as to how successful Kayak has been in rendering the website more iPad-like.

One reason for doing so was the success of Kayak’s iPad app, which English describes as “the most beautiful app we’ve done in eight years.”

English says session lengths and click-through rates usually dip for awhile when a redesign is implemented, but that hasn’t been the case in usability tests prior to the public launch of the redesign.

At the same time, Kayak hopes that the iPad-influenced redesign will be boosted by what he sees as the penchant for iOS users to be more active online travel transactors than Android users.

And, is there more to the iOS-influenced redesign than, well, meets the eye?

There has some been speculation that an Apple-Kayak alliance would make a lot of sense.

English won’t comment on such speculation.

He notes that rank-and-file Apple employees have reached out to Kayak, providing positive feedback about Kayak’s iOS apps, and that Kayak “has a very close relationship” with Apple.

Meanwhile, the Kayak.com redesign was rolling out today in the US only, and officials declined to reveal any timetable for implementing the redesign on other Kayak global websites.

Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?

Folloyu was founded by Alfred Shaffir at the beginning of 2011, who is also the active CEO. Alfred is a veteran of the semi-conductor industry, doing various roles in Intel and Cadence Design systems.

He holds an MBA from Bar-Ilan University and a BSc in Mechanical engineering from Tel Aviv University.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

So far, Folloyu is bootstrapped.

What problem are you trying to solve?

Online users are subject to interruptions which require them to disengage from their current online activity. The result in most cases is a complete abandonment of the content they were engaged in.

Describe the business, core products and services?

Folloyu’s solution enables online users to switch device while remaining in the same activity they were involved with, in a matter of a click.

For example, online shopper can move from his laptop to his mobile while the information, like what page he was on, shopping cart content, and even secured information (e.g. login) is exactly restored on the smartphone.

The value proposition for websites:

• Increasing mobile presence
• Increasing conversion rates
• Increasing time on site
• Improving overall customer satisfaction and loyalty

In addition, the customer will have access to a digested report describing the usage of Folloyu technology in his site, and additional information about his visitors browsing habits and mobile behaviour.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

Folloyu technology fits to almost every website around: ecommerce/traveling, publishers, video, trading, gaming and other content owners. At the moment, we are concentrating our effort in the ecommerce and publishers verticals.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

Our service was validated before starting R&D and we are receiving excellent feedback since then. There is a constant flow of customers that recognize Folloyu’s benefits and embed it into there website.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

Currently the service is free of charge. In the future we plan to charge our customers according to a monthly subscription plan, based on the amount of traffic a particular website will require. Our customers will receive notification prior to start of billing.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

There is a great opportunity these days to create a solution that on one hand addresses one of the biggest problems in the online world – the abandonment – and on the other hand, utilizes the abundance of devices hooked to the web.

Presently there are some solutions addressing mainly end-users’ in various industries: music listening (fivedetails.com), chatting (trillian.im), video (Vantrix.com) and even Google’s Chrome to Phone extension.

We believe that the competition will continue concentrating on the end users, while Folloyu will focus on producing a broad, generic and simple to implement B2B solution.

Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?

About 5% of the people I have discussed this with, thought it was not a good idea. The rest were enthusiastic. So basically, this is a good idea.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

10,000 subscribers.

Here is a clip:

NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.

We thought it would be interesting to compare the positions of leading agencies, accommodation providers and airlines year-on-year, picking the same period in 2010 and 2011, the second week of December.

This is what we found for the US and UK:

UK

Agencies:

Destinations and Accommodation:

Airlines:

USA

Agencies:

Destinations and Accommodation:

Airlines:

NB: Image via Shutterstock.

Because travelers are inherently “mobile”, it’s natural that travel companies have been early adopters in mobile, often blazing the trail in the mobile industry.

They were the first to have a transactional mobile site, first to leverage mobile apps, first to reach a global audience, and so forth.

By understanding the mobile traveler’s behavior, companies can leverage different mobile technologies to create new experiences that ease a traveler’s journey.

A notification strategy, for instance, is a great way to capitalize on existing technologies that can benefit the mobile traveler.

This article outlines top tips on how travel brands can use push notifications, SMS, and email notifications to maximize their customer engagement in the travel space.

1. Pushing information to plugged-in users

Push notifications is a native functionality in an app, where data can be sent to a user’s smartphone based on their location. Even if the app is closed, these messages can pop up on the user’s home screen to alert users with targeted messages.

This provides an effective way for travel companies to notify consumers of the latest travel warnings, deals, offers, flight changes, and more.

Delta Airlines is a great example of a travel company that has not only been successful in its overall mobile presence but has also effectively used push notifications that add value to the traveler.

In the era of smartphones, Delta recognized the importance of providing their customers with up-to-the-minute travel alerts, incorporating push notifications into their native app that immediately updates travelers with relevant flight information, warnings, deals, and more.

2. Texting campaigns have a real impact

With the rapid expansion of mobile broadband and wireless technology, travel companies have found that SMS allows them to effectively communicate with consumers in both a personal and timely manner.

Consumers must opt in to receive SMS alerts, ensuring that travel brands only send messages to consumers who are receptive to receiving them. SMS is an extremely effective means for travel companies to interact with consumers on an ongoing basis to deepen brand loyalty.

The Hilton Hotel Group has successfully leveraged text messaging to increase guest numbers to its hotels and build customer loyalty. SMS enables Hilton to instantly send out important marketing messages such as on-site specials and promotions, at the most appropriate time of day.

As a result of their text messaging efforts, the hotel has seen a 10-25% increase in offer redemptions, an increase in conversion that is a direct result of putting relevant content in front of the right people.

Similarly, Delta Airlines uses text messages as a way to keep travelers up to speed on crucial flight information. Users can choose to subscribe and get updates on all flights, or receive a one-time alert on a specific flight.

Both options provide users with up-to-the minute alerts on flight cancellations, delays, and schedule changes.

3. Maximizing email notifications in mobile

With more than 20% of email marketing messages read on mobile devices, it’s essential for travel brands make sure that all links users visit from their smartphones direct them to a mobile optimized view of the site.

Additionally, deep links, which are links that bring users to a subsection of the website beyond the homepage, must also be optimized for mobile in order to maximize the traffic that is driven to the site from mobile devices.

For example, if a smartphone user follows a link from an email campaign that directs them to the standard desktop page view, they are likely to be discouraged by the slower load time and having to zoom in to properly engage with the promotion.

This reduces the change that the customer will convert and will decrease the likelihood of them engaging with the brand via mobile in the future.

US Airways is a great example of a travel company that has been leveraging the advantages of notifications. Through its flight notification system, BeNotified, travelers can sign up to receive emails with up-to-the minute departure, arrival, delay and cancellation information.

With email marketing messages increasingly read from mobile phones, all travel companies must ensure that their email notifications support links that direct readers to a version of the site properly formatted, regardless of the device they’re using at the time.

4. Use mobile to deliver timely content to travelers

Simply offering an optimized mobile site is no longer sufficient in fully engaging and retaining customers. In order to set themselves apart from competitors, travel companies must find new ways to actively engage and add value to their customers who are constantly on-the-go.

Offering an optimized mobile presence is a first step, but travel companies can build on this by actively delivering relevant information to the customer in a timely and effective manner.

Strategically incorporating tactics like push notifications, SMS, and email notifications allow travel companies to do just that.

NB: This is a guest article by Jason Taylor, head of platform strategy and innovation at Usablenet.

NB2: Image via Shutterstock.

Not to get too technical (anyone who is actually technical will laugh after this explanation), but Flex enabled companies to create highly responsive experiences by moving some of the application logic to the client, enabling users to manipulate some of the data on the page without having to ping the server and reload the page.

This not only delivers super-fast response to the user, but reduces the load on web server, database, etc.

Flex powers many well-known websites and applications from the BBC, Yahoo!, Kodak and Mint.com. It’s also used by prominent travel companies powering multiple applications from Sabre and Travelocity Desktop.

A few weeks ago I wrote about Adobe’s decision to throw in the towel on Flash for mobile devices. By extension Forrester’s Mike Gualtieri noted that the move also spelled the end of Flex development too.

Mike’s a smart guy.

Just a few days later Adobe announced that it will be contributing Flex to an Open Source foundation “…in the same way we contributed PhoneGap to the Apache Foundation when we acquired Nitobi””.

This almost certainly spells the end of Flex as nothing says “I love you” like declaring that you’re ending all significant investment in a platform and leaving the work to “the community”.

This is a big deal for organizations who have made significant investments in Flex and individuals who have personally invested in developing their skills. Those investments will be hard to recover and will require a significant effort in some cases to transition.

I wish there was more guidance provided on how Adobe was going to help their clients and committed developers make the transition other than saying that support for Flex will continue under the open source umbrella, but that HTML5 is the long term direction.

I hope that they will come forward with more details on migration strategy to help their loyal customers manage the transition smoothly and efficiently.

Now, while it may be the right play for Adobe, the way they announced it rubbed me the wrong way.

Firstly, the equivalence they are trying to make with PhoneGap is false.

PhoneGap was already an Open Source product under Nitobi. It’s still my belief that the decision to donate the code to Apache was a condition of the deal driven by Nitobi’s founders to ensure it remained so.

Secondly, the announcement almost presumes that they believe their developers are stupid enough not to see through the spin that is so poor that it’s only worthy of a political campaign – remindful of Bill Clinton’s statement that he was not sure what the definition of “is” actually is.

• The statement “…our customers want more direct control over the underlying technologies they use” attempts to position Adobe as a champion of Open Source projects. It’s as if they think that my merely mentioning open source all developers will get all doe-eyed and appreciate the great gift of ending their investment in the platform. So where is the open sourcing of the other tools that Adobe will continue to develop… and monetize? [cricket sounds]
• “Adobe will continue to contribute to the Flex SDK” – translation: we will provide slightly more than two cats and a dog, but our investment will pale compared to the past.

The final release of Flex, the Flex 4.6 SDK, was delivered on December 1 2011. What Adobe’s statement is telling you, is that basically you’re on your own now.

Companies with lots of time and money invested in Flex need to start planning your evolution from Flex to HMTL5 now.

If you wait too long, you could be left playing catch-up, or worse holding onto an unsupported technology.

The life of the multi-device travel booker is changing, offering an incredible opportunity for travel companies of all shapes and sizes.

But for me, working in the customer experience space, I’m constantly astounded by how many companies seem to forget the part they have to play in the two-way relationship between brand and consumer that is a reality today in our online, socially-connected world.

Research we have been working on clearly shows how few opportunities travel companies have to get it right when it comes to providing a good customer experience, no matter what device consumers are using.

At a general level, we find that 42% say a positive online experience when booking a holiday is important. And, on mobile, the research is even clearer; 40% mobile bookers surveyed said they would expect their experience booking or researching a holiday on a mobile device to be the same or better than on a desktop computer.

If they did struggle when using a mobile device, 46% of those with a mobile device said it would negatively affect their feelings towards the brand and 38% would be likely to book their next holiday with a different provider based on the poor mobile experience.

These are the kind of results that make a CFO or CEO suddenly sit up and see the importance of not just ‘doing mobile’, but doing it right.

The truth is, British consumers, like many others around the world, are incredibly web savvy these days.

After 15 years of ecommerce, there is zero tolerance for sites that don’t deliver a near perfect experience and, with competitors a click away, travel ebusinesses have never had to work so hard to keep our custom. So you’d be forgiven for thinking that ebookers would continue to have similarly low expectations for the latest new digital trends like mobile.

It just isn’t the case. Online bookers see online as one channel, regardless of the device they are using. While travel companies are eager to increasingly have a specific mobile strategy, consumers aren’t compartmentalising in the same way.

The bad news for businesses is that meeting these high expectations will take a lot of hard work. Developing an effective ecommerce strategy that encompasses new trends like mobile and social commerce won’t happen overnight.

And while consumers don’t need to understand that everything works in different ways across different devices or platforms, businesses must because there is a massive opportunity. And, as seen above, a big brand reputation headache is the cost of getting it wrong.

The time to act is now.

These high consumer expectations mean companies have no time to waste. Travel companies have had a long time to get it right online, but with emerging technologies they are not getting any benefit of the doubt.

And the complications aren’t decreasing any time soon. In the last two years it’s been all about smartphones, for the next two it’s going to be smartphones and tablets. And who knows what will follow after that.

We all just might be transacting on Facebook in the near future. So putting in place a platform-proofed strategy for the short and long term will be vital.

Of course, the potential rewards are plentiful, you just have to make sure that the consumer experience – no matter what device they use – is as good as it can possibly be.

NB: This is a guest article by Geoff Galat, chief marketing officer at Tealeaf.

NB2: Full report and research available from Tealeaf.

NB3: Image via Shutterstock.

Known as FACT-Finder Travel, the tool is a semantic search system targeting online travel agents which allows consumers to enter free text during search queries, including spelling mistakes, slang and abbreviations.

The company hopes the improved usability will help switch online travel agencies to its solution.

The system interprets what users are looking for and populates search criteria boxes with the correct information.

FACT-Finder has been working with ecommerce sites from other sectors for some time but decided to extend into travel because of what it claims is a general poor user experience.

During a usability test on five German OTAs, the company found semantic search reduced clicks to input all the travel information from an average of 16 with conventional search to two for semantic.

Time taken to input details was also reduced from an average of just over one minute to 22 seconds.

The company is offering what it describes as an innovative commercial model whereby companies only pay if they see improved conversion rates.

The intuitive technology has already been implemented by German OTA, weg.de.

Here is a clip:

The Multichannel Customer Experience Report, carried out by Econsultancy and Foviance, shows 57% of consumers have interacted online with travel companies in the past six months compared to the 20% who have had dealings with a travel agent.

When it comes to booking travel, 47% of consumers say they booked online.

Despite the figures, consumers still rate offline touchpoints as important with 17% saying they have used a travel brochure in the past six months.

When it comes to rating their most recent travel experience with the various channels, 76% describe their in-store experience as good or excellent compared to 81% who say the experience via their desktop was good or excellent.

Interaction with travel companies via phone or call centre did not rate as well with 65% of consumers saying the experience was either good or excellent.

The top three most important factors for a positive online experience emerged as efficient customer service, low-price but high-quality products although the quick resolution of problems also rated quite highly for the travel sector.

The research, which also looks at the commitment of companies to deliver an integrated experience, shows 46% of respondents see buy-in from top management as key.

However, only 26% of respondents say their company has a well-developed strategy in place to improve customer experience, only four percentage points up on last year’s figure of 22%.

The complex nature of the customer experience is  now seen as the greatest barrier to creating a better integrated experience overtaking organisational structure in last year’s study.

The research, conducted earlier this year in conjunction with online survey specialist Toluna, surveyed 5,000 consumers across five sectors including travel, banking and retail.

But while booking travel products is certainly more complex than buying a loaf of bread at a supermarket (or, indeed, online), this clip from Google Analytics demonstrates the frustrations many users must go through with online checkouts in general, especially when the guidance is less than helpful.

It’s rather funny as well…

A study by Tealeaf and eConsultancy was recently highlighted in eMarketer, using a fabulous expression: preventing customer struggle.

Let’s be honest, the customer experiences such frustrations A LOT. And it is totally unnecessary.

Should we be surprised? Well, according to the study, a whopping 41% of execs admitted to not having processes in place to address customer service issues. OUCH!

So, yes, your customers are struggling to deal with you. As online customer service represents one of the nine epic web battles of instant vs personal service, the lack of any service is a terrible indictment on what should be the greatest channel for customer service known to man.

This does not just apply to online travel products but for all forms and channels for selling travel.

Any self-respecting company today has a website, but so many just fail to leverage it well when it comes to customer service. Now, for fear of tarnishing the entire industry, some do the simple things very well. But they can, why do others fail?

Here are the eight cardinal sins of online customer service. This applies to just about any industry but we are focusing on the travel marketplace.

We are also pointing out examples of Saints and Sinners, purely to illustrate each point. You can judge whether they are real saints or real sinners for yourself.

Sin #1 No online customer service

Not having any customer service channel online is a proper sin. This is so basic as to be downright stupid if you do not have a presence.

Saints: Delta (#DeltaAssist)

Sinners: Southwest used to be a sinner and did not allow email. Thankfully it now does.

Sin #2 No clarity

The confusing and complex array of options that confront a user who tries to find assistance makes customer service online a confusing web of stupid choices and dead ends. There are some who can reduce things to a simple and comprehensible set of options and make it easy for the consumer.

Saints: SeatacPark.com (If you live in Seattle you will know what I mean).

Sinners: Expedia, Travelocity

Sin #3 No response aka denial. Coupled with SLOW response.

No response is unforgivable – today everyone expects to receive a confirmation with useful information via email.

The issue of whether you should or should not reply is not the issue. Everyone should have customer service procedures that acknowledges the user. An email with helpful hints is a good thing.

After setting up the ability to post information and then ignoring it without reply at all, especially when you have a system to reply and then you fail to reply, is bad.

Saints: JetBlue (after getting a bloody nose on the subject)

Sinners: Old style airlines. Keep ‘em in the dark still seems to be the policy for many airlines.

Sin #4 No escalation/no updates.

“Enter your information here”. But we will decide if we will get back to you. No commitment to escalate the response is so common as to be an epidemic of bad behaviour.

For the majority of cases there is no escalation process online – the only way to escalate is to start again and get a live answer via the telephone.

Emails and Tweets are the worst examples of this. Most customer service suits have an automatic escalation process, yet few actually deal with it.

Even worse is when brands appear to have no standard procedure for when they will get back to a customer. In the ADD world of the customer, give him/her an expectation of when you will get back to them. Then if nobody does, auto-escalate it.

Saints: Nobody

Sinners: Just about everyone

Sin # 5 Ignoring the customer

Generally thinking, if you ignore things they will go away… BAD policy. While I have listed Ryanair as a Sinner here, you have to applaud them for being consistent and honest about it.

Saints: Jetblue

Sinners: Ryanair

Sin #6 No coordination of customer service

I spent six months in customer service hell, trying to get a response from a mortgage company to get a house loan fixed.

The appalling nature of the human and machine customer service systems interface is so easily fixed. We have some great tools – many, such as chat, are free.

Yet each of procedure presents different answers and different paths. For most services there is no single place and no ability to coordinate my activities. Solution – have a single contact system. There are so many great solutions out there.

Saints – British Airways Executive Club, but then only in small bursts.

Sinners –  Everyone else.

Sin #7 No metrics

With the web capable of tracking everything, there are several issues here. Many companies do not have a metric for their web activity. Few accurately measure their input. And even fewer even do meaningful things with the data that they have.

I am sure there will be howls of protest over this one, but the vast majority of you know what I mean.

Saints: Not allowed to reveal

Sinners: Too many to name

Sin #8 Failure to update information and provide real time updates particularly in a crisis

With Twitter, there is no longer any excuse for this. If you have no way to broadcast your information via the social web then you deserve to be spanked and slayed in public.

The ash cloud episode of 2010, plus during bad weather such as the the current hurricane season, have seen things improve enormously. Twitter is a fabulous tool for getting information out.

Saints: Led by Delta – everyone in the airline industry now knows how to do this.

Sinners: Hotels in general.

So how do you do? Ask yourself the basic questions raised above.

Then, something we recommend to each and every executive who works for any travel company: attempt to understand customer service within your own company, and in that of your competitors.

Better still, sit with someone who is not familiar with your business and let them try and do this. In my consultancy business we do this as a matter of course on all our clients.

There is no excuse for this. And many brands worry why they have so little brand loyalty. Try the old fashion way. EARN IT!

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Time Out says the acquisition will allow it integrate the LikeCube software into its existing platform so a user’s “taste graph” can better deliver ideas as they browse through its existing editorial content.

The data comes from a user and the wider readership’s filters, with the LikeCube system learning about habits and preferences to produce better recommendations.

LikeCube’s biggest customer to date is European recommendation service Qype.

Time Out says there are “no immediate plans to stop working with existing clients” as the likeCube technology is integrated into the service.

Three LikeCubers have joined Time Out as part of the acquisition: co-founders Eleanor Ford and Daniele Turi, who created the business in 2006, alongside development whizz Ismael Juma.

Ford says:

“We are delighted to see personalisation and a renewed focus on innovation at the heart of Time Out. Our starting point at LikeCube was to allow users to discover the most relevant places, based on what they like and what people like them like, with Time Out this will become a reality.”

The acquisition is being touted by Time Out Group, the umbrella organisation in which its destination guide products in 35 cities around the world sit, as a “rapid progression towards consolidation as a digital media group” under CEO David King.

Here is an interview Hotel-Blogs carried out with Ford in 2009:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2C3aO9xxtvc

Google Hotel Finder enables you to “draw simple shapes to define the neighborhoods (yes, more than one!) that interest you,” Google says.

So, you can redraw a default shape Google Hotel Finder provides and hone in on a section of Chicago, for example,  to find hotels in a neighborhood of interest like this:

The shape in Google Hotel Finder can be a bit difficult to manipulate, especially when you are trying to view neighborhoods in hotel-crowded tourist areas, and the user experience is very gray.

Things brighten up when you click one of the blue dots and get hotel details, including reviews.

But, compare and contrast the way Google handles its new hotel search by shapes with Lasso Search on HotPads.com, a real estate and hotel search engine.

If you are looking for an apartment rental on HotPads in the Fenway section of Boston, for instance, you merely grab a lasso icon, drag it to the Fenway area on your map and “lasso” the area where you might want to rent.

You can then select a apartment building icon and view rental deals in a window that opens like this with the lassoed section still open at left:

Is the HotPads Lasso Search more user-friendly than the way Google does it?

Play around with it yourself and decide.

Paul Gleger, a HotPads spokesman, notes that “whereas Google relies on four points to narrow down an area, HotPads allows the user to draw at the pixel level, creating literally any shape that might match the desired location.”

In addition, users can name their Lasso and share it with friends, and they can opt to receive notifications about new rentals coming on the market within their self-drawn Lassos, Gleger says.

The Lasso tool debuted in March 2011, Gleger adds.

What the HotPads Lasso Search and shape search in Google Hotel Finder have in common is that both enable you to view apartment rentals or hotel details, respectively, while giving you the ability to continue your search on the same page.

In addition, both HotPads and Google Hotel Finder enable users to manipulate more than one shape on a map.

You can expect this sort of searching to evolve into various incarnations.

A key question is whether masses of consumers will find this sort of search useful for hotels or merely a frill for the most geeky among us.

The company examined length of time spent on websites, how many websites visited, length of booking cycle and more.

It then turned the data into a rather nice infographic:

NB: More information about WIHP and its services.

Every day new records are broken in terms of mobile usage in travel. But there is no definitive guide yet on how to turn a hotel mobile website into a successful engagement platform for mobile users.

Mobile users have a different mindset when approaching websites, therefore your hotel’s website experience must be quite different to engage them.

In addition, mobile users are much more task-oriented than desktop users. And mobile users are either searching for local content or for a specific brand.

Mobile means smartphones, not tablets. Tablets provide an experience similar to desktops.

But while certain mechanisms may need to be adapted to a multi-touch experience, most websites that are optimized for 1024×768 should work well on tablets.

Considering these two factors, below are five simple tips to turn your hotel mobile website into a successful engagement platform for mobile users:

1. Mobile SEO matters.

One little known fact: Google is dominant in mobile search (Google mobile market share is over 97%). Hence, a mobile SEO strategy can rely on Google only.

Start by ensuring that you sitemap marks your mobile pages with the “mobile” tag.

Also, use Google’s mobile keywords tool to verify whether you need different content for your mobile website.

2. Optimize the website for low bandwidth and high latency.

With the emergence of iPhone and Android, many web developers assume that mobile has become a web-friendly environment.

However, mobile is still an aggressive environment where bandwidth is restricted and latency is 10x worst than using DSL.

So, a hotel mobile website has to follow a few simple rules, the most important one being that pages should be smaller than 20 kbytes.

The W3 mobile validator tool identifies what is needed to optimize your mobile website.

3. Display the address boldly.

Looking for the property’s address and directions is the top task users perform on a hotel mobile website. A whopping 1.5% of users actually check out the hotel’s location and get directions via Google Maps.

Hence, the address of the properly should be highlighted and easy to click through to Google Maps on every page.

4. Have a click-to-call button.

The second most important task users want to complete when accessing the hotel website from their mobile phone is to call the hotel.

To service these users representing over 1% of mobile traffic, your hotel mobile website should display the phone number prominently and enable direct click-to-call.

Note that it is critical to display phone numbers in the international format with “+” and the country code so that international users can call your hotel.

5. Provide a simple booking experience.

Click-through-rates (CTRs) for pages that are formatted for mobile are 75% higher than pages that are not mobile-optimized.

Therefore, providing a multi-touch booking experience is critical to ensure that you can capitalize on your hotel’s mobile website.

While mobile booking is still fairly new, an average of 1% of all mobile visitors actually book a hotel reservation using a multi-touch booking engine.

NB: This is a guest article by Pedro Colaco, president and CEO of GuestCentric.

Goh, who took up the role earlier this year, sent a letter to customers yesterday to say sorry for a string of issues with the new website which launched seven weeks ago.

Visitors to the site found a lot of the functionality did not work properly, including changing flights, redeeming loyalty points, online check-in and logging in to membership tools.

“We make no excuses for our failure to deliver an acceptable level of online service”, says Goh in the letter, before pledging to resolve the problems and claiming “significant progress” so far as it also looks to investigate why such a major series of issues went undetected.

“As with all new initiatives that we undertake, the intention behind the website revamp was to improve on our customers’ experience with us. I am truly sorry that the new website, with its technical problems, has instead caused much aggravation for many of our customers.”

Fans of the airline’s Facebook page are not in a particularly forgiving mood. One says:

“It took you two months to acknowledge a serious problem on your website… What is your time line to fix the issue? Two years? Why do you inconvenience your customer when the website is obviously sub standard… Why cant you test it in a non production environment.. Why do you even allow such a thing to happen in the first place?”

Others are angry that the airline has only offered an apology and not offered to compensate those who had travel plans cancelled as a result of not being able to check in or change flights.

The launch of the new site came just five months after Goh joined from sister airline SilkAir, replacing CEO Chew Choon Seng who retired at the end of 2010 after seven years in the position.

The Webcredible 2011 Flights Online Report examines 20 air product retailers (airlines and online travel agencies) and ranks them based on 20 criteria around UEX and design.

Virgin just lost out in the 2010 study, coming in third place behind EasyJet and eventual winner BA.

Securing the top spot this year, Webcredible says of the Virgin site:

“Virgin Atlantic has made clear improvements scoring highly across best practice usability guidelines including error handling methods, providing the ability to share pages with friends, and offering clear search functions.”

The study also looked at mobile versions of websites. Webcredible says the pair “have started to create more useful mobile offerings with both carrier airlines judged favourably in their efforts to engage customers across channels”.

The total average across the 20 websites increased on the previous year, rising from 64.4% in 2010 to 65.7 in 2011.

“With only nine websites scoring between 60-69 points and 5 websites scoring between 50 and 59 points, most UK travel sites are still failing to do enough to maximise their share of the potential revenue in this highly competitive marketplace by addressing key usability issues.”

The study found there was no significant disparity between online travel agencies and airline websites, although it remarks that did “lag behind in terms of showing prices early on during the booking journey as well as offering easy refinement of searches, displaying a contact telephone number, and showing a clear progress bar during the flight booking process”.

Airline websites were singled out for providing information around cancellations and refunds being prominent enough for users to find.

Here is the full table:

Without further delay, here’s the “before” picture — the previous Travelocity homepage, where the booking engine is somewhat overwhelmed by the huge Travelocity banner image and promotion.

Notice above that the booking engine is a relatively busy affair and is divided into Book My Trip, My Deals and My Travelocity sections. Also, under Book My Trip, there are eight choices of types of inventory to book.

And, drumroll please, here is the “after” picture, namely the redesigned homepage:

As part of the overall redesign of the homepage, Travelocity divided the booking engine into four sections, tapped into the current question and answer craze by inserting text such as “What Do You Need?” and  ”Where Do You Want to Go?” and highlighted each section with varying color schemes.

Travelocity also removed Hotel + Car and Last Minute Packages as booking choices in the homepage booking engine, cleaning up the overall look.

Here’s a closeup of the booking engine itself, with a smallish Roaming Gnome anchoring it at bottom left and providing a bridge to a Travel Deals section beneath the booking engine.

To varying degrees, Travelocity’s competitors already have made their booking engines homepage heroes, too, so let’s call it a trend. Competitors’ booking engines likewise occupy high-valued homepage real estate.

For example, here’s Priceline’s homepage and booking engine, where William Shatner is right in the mix of things in contast to the cameo by the Roaming Gnome for Travelocity.

And, Expedia.com, too, knows that not only Where You Book Matters, but where your booking engine is placed on your homepage matters, too.

And, while Expedia’s booking engine is at the top left of its homepage and has a bold feel to it, the Orbitz booking engine is similarly positioned but its squared design makes it feel like it was cut and pasted onto the page perhaps five years ago.

The Orbitz booking engine badly needs some curves.

Take a quick tour at the design of travel booking engines around the Web and you’ll find that some sites have let their booking engines become part of the supporting cast rather than giving them star status.

For example, take a look at the the BookIt.com booking engine which, rather than being a hero, definitely needs a rescue.  The rest of the homepage seems to swallows it up.

Alas, Travelocity redesigned more than just the booking engine, of course.

Joel Frey, a Travelocity spokesman, notes the redesigned homepage has a revamped deals section, which displays offers based on your home airport, and there are new promotional spots on the right side of the page.

Among other twists, consumers can now use image-driven search to peruse Top Travel Destinations, and a Twitter-influenced Trending Now in Travel section at the bottom left of the homepage is based on Travelocity’s most popular pages.

“Having these links featured prominently from the homepage also helps us from an SEO (search engine optimization) perspective,” Frey explains.

There are also a couple of changes atop the new homepage: Facebook “like” and Twitter buttons have been inserted into the header, and Travelocity’s most popular destination, Las Vegas, gets its own tab atop the homepage.

Vegas, baby, has become a Travelocity high-roller with its status as the only destination with its own tab.

And, Las Vegas knows all about tabs.

The low-cost carrier is starting the process by switching the site’s homepage and some of the its newer destination landing pages.

The design is not exactly a radical new approach to digital user experience but is certainly a more modern look compared to the existing layout and colour scheme, having switched much of the theme to a softer yellow (rather than bold blue) and including bigger, more user friendly tabs and buttons.

The old look:

At this stage the search and booking channels are still running on the old design but presumably will be carried through into the new design short. Waiting for confirmation on the timeline from a Ryanair official.

More prominence on the homepage has also been handed to Ryanair’s partners, such as Booking.com for hotels, Hostelworld for budget accommodation, Hertz for car hire, AlwaysonVacation for apartment rental, and HolidayExtras for airport parking.

The airline is also now two years into a concerted effort to boost its online media revenues through party advertising.

Announced today, year on year passenger numbers increased by 8% for the 12 months ending March 2011. Revenue over the same period jumped 21% from Euro 2.98 billion to Euro 3.63 billion, with pre-tax profit increasing by 26% from Euro 319 million to Euro 401 million.

Who and what are you (including personnel and backgrounds)?

SaleCycle helps ecommerce businesses recover abandoned bookings online. Through our unique capture code, we are able to trace user through the booking process and re-target them if they don’t complete the process.

We’re currently working with a number of travel/leisure clients who are seeing a monthly increase in sales of more than 5%.

The most effective method of re-targeting is email and we work with each clients’ Email Service Provider’ to ensure our message hit the inbox.

The business operates out of two offices (UK and US) and from starting with a small team of developers; it now employs 20 full time staff.

The business founder is Dominic Edmunds, who after more than a decade of working in an agency environment, facilitating high profile travel and leisure clients formed SaleCycle with the backing of The Leighton Group.

What financial support did you have to launch the business?

The business is privately funded and after its formation in February 2010, turned profit in December 2010.

What problem are you trying to solve?

We’re helping businesses to recover lost bookings by re-targeting users who don’t complete the booking process.  A problem in which less than 15% of online companies are actively addressing.

Describe the business, core products and services?

SaleCycle recover abandoned bookings online. We are a SAAS business that allows each client access their own live dashboard and reporting suite in order to monitor performance of direct sales, abandonments and recovered bookings in real time.

We respond to every abandonment individually in real time to increase conversion rates and improve the customer experience.  Each response is fully personalised to the individual customer and their prospective booking

Each client defines the amount of time that passes between abandonment and response, this ensures that we achieve an optimum level of performance and maximise recovered revenue.

Who are your key customers and users at launch?

Our first leisure client was the Malmaison Hotel chain.

Did you have customers validate your idea before investors?

Our business was built based upon live proof of concept testing with our partners. The results of this testing highlighted the business potential and the requirement for investment.

What is the business AND revenue model, strategy for profitability?

The business turned profit in December 2010. Our model for growth is based upon sales as we charge commission on very booking we recover.

SWOT analysis – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats?

Strengths:

• Our platform is independent, allowing it to work with any booking engine/ecommerce platform/email service provider.
• Our capture code is very light and can be implemented in a matter of hours.

Weaknesses:

• As our revenue model is commission based, we only get paid if we recover sales. That means that is the service doesn’t work, we don’t get paid. That said, we have team of dedicated account managers who are targeted to optimise all recovery campaigns to ensure success.

Opportunities:

• We capture a variety of data which can be used to create individual user records and identify virtual preferences. Although this data is a by-product, it has immense value in creating vertical based benchmark reports which we hope to produce soon.

Threats:

• Although we are the market leader, competition is currently very thin on the ground. As time passes we expect to operate in a more crowded sector.

Who advised you your idea isn’t going to be successful and why didn’t you listen to them?

In truth, no-one. The business concept is simple, it’s engaging and easily translates to real life case studies.

What is your success metric 12 months from now?

The growth targets for the business are aggressive and we hope to increase our turnover by 12.5x.

NB: TLabs Showcase is part of the wider TLabs project from Tnooz.