This New Experiment By Expedia Might Give It A Significant Competitive Advantage

February 1st, 2017 by Trefis Team
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We know how competitive the online travel industry is! While the leading players try growing by acquisitions and also organically, there seems to be no dearth of disruptive forces. Hence, in order to remain ahead of competition, leading players need to always innovate ways in which they can offer better products and services to their customers. Expedia’s trying to understand the customers’ experience while they are booking travel services on its website seem to be one such move.

Expedia is currently working on an experiment with the help of volunteers in order to understand people’s emotions when they’re navigating its website. In their recently opened London-based usability laboratory, Expedia’s researchers wired a few volunteers with electrodes and tracked their eye movements and observed their behavior through a one-way glass. The subjects were examined for the smallest of muscle movements through sensors and they were also interviewed in order to gain a better insight to their mind state when trying to book travel services through Expedia.

The aim of these experiments is to formulate ways to reduce stress or frustration that arises in users while trying to make a booking online. Expedia’s UK office found in a survey that ~75% of their sample considered booking travel online to be as emotionally draining as having a bad day at office or quarreling with a dear one. Almost one-third admitted to having become more confused with online bookings due to the plethora of available options.

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Expedia has also built a Scratchpad feature, with the help of insights from some of its usability labs, that saves users’ travel searches automatically as one goes along to see other things. To their surprise, the researchers found that an average user looks for up to 48 flight listing and sometimes resort to pen and paper to keep a tab, before booking an air ticket.

There were other insights such as users preferred hotel rooms that showed a window with a pleasant view, rather than rooms whose main focus was the bed. These insights help hotel owners to feature their hotel in a way that attracts most hotel bookers. For the purposes of its experiments, the company had increased its number of engineers and currently conducts over 1,000 A/B tests annually in order enhance the user experience for its websites and mobile applications.

We expect such insights would significantly increase Expedia’s understanding of the consumer behavior in the online travel domain and thereby offer it a unique comparative advantage over its peers.

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Notes:

1) The purpose of these analyses is to help readers focus on a few important things. We hope such lean communication sparks thinking, and encourages readers to comment and ask questions on the comment section, or email content@trefis.com
2) Figures mentioned are approximate values to help our readers remember the key concepts more intuitively. For precise figures, please refer to our complete analysis for Expedia

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