Interfaces of the aggregator of tours: what we have done and where we need the help of Habr
We aggregate tours in one search to find the cheapest ones. Our main problem is that we know too well the specifics of the tours, and we already have a professional deformation. We grew up on tour operator tour search interfaces, and then, in fact, made a metasystem for search. But this is a professional user interface superimposed on the user experience. Which requires something else altogether.
I will now show that I was able to find the successful one, and what was really bad, that is, where I would not refuse your help. For any useful advice (even which we cannot, for one reason or another, implement) - from us a discount on a tour in the form of a promotional code for 1000 rubles without an expiration date. And then the story, why not, if we do not implement.
It turned out to be important for the traveler to know the past of the hotel’s name (they often change their names when changing owners, to get rid of the tail of old reviews), beach type (sandy or pebble), average monthly weather and so on.
Now we have a group of independent travelers who would not have taken a tour in real life if it had been bundled (flights, hotel, insurance, transfer) would not be cheaper than air tickets for self-purchase. That is, those people who know how to save.
')
So, these people, if they don’t know this chip beforehand and deliberately, then run away, because they do not associate tours with a free journey, but with a buffet, a bus crawling from sunburn and Russian tourists and a moron guide. This, of course, is not always the case, but the stereotype is settled. We are now moving in the direction of how to explain more clearly what is working and how.
Let's start with the main element - this is the tour search string. Here everything seems to be clear. Where, how much, just a small plug on the date of departure and the duration of the trip, how many people.
Here we brought out two useful and at the same time unloading server things:
Under the strip, we immediately made a summary of the minimum prices. We take them from the cache for a day, so they are not always minimal (in fact, the prices are updated every 15 minutes, and the tours are dismantled), but it is very expensive to update more quickly, alas.
Everything seems to be good here as a whole, the only thing is, perhaps, we will make the choice not “there is a fork for 3 days - there is no plug”, but also 5 days. Alas, it will dramatically increase the load on the requests of tour operators, and, I recall, clever work with cache and queries is the main feature of the engine. We are an avalanche of requests we are able to perfectly put the server of operators.
Not all travelers are looking for a destination as our main form suggests. Sometimes the question is put this way: there is a certain budget, it is necessary to keep within it. We have long resolved this issue. On the basis of the same analysis of the cache, they also made a calendar of the lowest prices:
Now, looking at him, I already understand that somehow we put it on the site on the site: it is in the top menu in “ More - Calendar ”. Counterintuitively, while we think what to do next with him. It has long been doing a newsletter with the cheapest tours for those who follow the price (you can subscribe to the main or a specific direction), and another common Telegram channel with the sweetest. With the channel, I’m worried that the wrong thing is being sent now - it’s not the biggest discounts that are needed, but tours within a limited budget, perhaps.
The page is very long, so at the top there is a navigator by country. I begin to suspect that we still need to make a border for the price.
The third scenario of a tour search is when a person wants to tell everything in words, like in the office of a tour operator. Such buyers may be 10-15%, depending on the season. To do this, we have a 24-hour contact center for 90–150 operators and a callback button (“Give me a tour”). Button significantly added transitions, by the way. Just a long distance call still scares people away, and the “callback” doesn’t work like a direct indication why it is needed. As a result, there were generally two buttons: a callback order and a tour selection wizard, which ends with either a call or a visit to a partner’s office in the real world.
An important insight was this:
There is a third paradigm. People often do not know either the direction or the budget, but they really want to touch the bug or go skiing. We help.
Long loading - for example, in Thailand with a plug for 3 days about 2000 requests for tours are made. During the download, we have the opportunity to immediately show the prices from the cache and at the start we describe the main advantages, so that people understand that this is not just a search, but also a guarantee.
The calendar appears approximately at the third or fifth second of the search, because in the case of a cooled cache, this is a huge DBMS join:
We begin to show options when the search is not over, about 40% of the data.
This is where the problems begin. The fact is that the generally accepted standard of the sphere is grouping by hotels. That is, when you want to rest somewhere in another country, we show you hotels where you can stay. Many in this place think that this is something like a search for accommodation, not a tour, and leave. About two months ago we rolled such a die to make it clearer:
And they also made these small inscriptions on the tour itself, such as “price for 2 adults, flights are included”. Another important point: many show the price for one, for us - for two.
This page is perhaps the most difficult to understand for our customers, but, honestly, I already have such an obscured eye that I don’t know what else to do here. If you look and write how you were looking for a tour, it will help a lot.
There are a lot of problems with filters. As our statistics show, a rare bird reaches the third filter when choosing a hotel. The most important filter for popular destinations, for example, is the distance to the beach. And we have about a hundred signs, which can be used to classify a hotel. What else is the factor of choice for you and in what situations?
Here is the tour page. More precisely, the hotel, because it is usually tied to a dozen tours (there are three of them, you can see in the middle block). Upstairs we have a hotel. Already we guess that you need to write something about the tour itself, and not just about the place of residence. We do not yet understand what would be the most convenient.
Under the block with the tours - all the chips and hotel amenities like the availability of free Wi-Fi. This is important for tourists, but sometimes this thing depends on the class of the room, especially if the hotel has several buildings. We still do not know the type of the number, so we show everything from the database. Another point - it is very interesting to understand how you travel to an unfamiliar city using the map of the hotel’s location and what you are looking for and see on it.
Further reviews "TopHotels" (this is the most relevant service without any markups, we pull them up) and ours from trusted travelers. Tell me, do you understand what tabs are there, or does it look like banners?
Here we have nothing about the tour itself, because, in fact, it must also be chosen from the options attached to this hotel. But something must be shown, obviously. If you tell me exactly what you can tell the reader of the site at this stage, it will be very cool.
This is how the tour card looks like, if you go further:
Here, on the advice of the yuzabelist, we turned off all the “background noise” - navigation and even clicks to the logo. This raised the conversion, but I'm not sure that this is completely correct (in case you go back a step).
Very important reviews. They make it clear that all this really works. Let me remind you: we have one of the main objections of the first years was that the travel agent in the office in case of what can be beaten, and the operator - no.
Reviews go without filtering (here, for example, a deuce on the main):
As it turned out, it does not interfere at all. People understand perfectly well that when 10 positive and one bad is perfectly normal. On the other hand, when there are 50 positives and not a single bad thing, the legitimate question arises about whether the reviews are not hot.
There are many more cases: traveling with a baby (there is an option in the search), the start is not from Moscow (the default start city is selected by the user's GeoIP), the calendar at the top of the search, and so on.
In general, I would be very grateful if you walked around the site a bit and said that it seems counterintuitive to you.
Thank you in advance.
I will now show that I was able to find the successful one, and what was really bad, that is, where I would not refuse your help. For any useful advice (even which we cannot, for one reason or another, implement) - from us a discount on a tour in the form of a promotional code for 1000 rubles without an expiration date. And then the story, why not, if we do not implement.
It turned out to be important for the traveler to know the past of the hotel’s name (they often change their names when changing owners, to get rid of the tail of old reviews), beach type (sandy or pebble), average monthly weather and so on.
the main problem
Now we have a group of independent travelers who would not have taken a tour in real life if it had been bundled (flights, hotel, insurance, transfer) would not be cheaper than air tickets for self-purchase. That is, those people who know how to save.
')
So, these people, if they don’t know this chip beforehand and deliberately, then run away, because they do not associate tours with a free journey, but with a buffet, a bus crawling from sunburn and Russian tourists and a moron guide. This, of course, is not always the case, but the stereotype is settled. We are now moving in the direction of how to explain more clearly what is working and how.
Three tour search scenarios
Let's start with the main element - this is the tour search string. Here everything seems to be clear. Where, how much, just a small plug on the date of departure and the duration of the trip, how many people.
Here we brought out two useful and at the same time unloading server things:
- Travelers did many consecutive searches, that is often the departure date was not as important as the price of the tour. Therefore, we immediately added the default plug. This turned out to be good for conversion too (people immediately see cheaper options and are more likely to buy) and for the server (such blocks are easier to query and cache in the end).
- The man does not buy the tour from the first time. As a rule, these are two visits: “intelligence”, that is, a general inspection, what and how about prices, then a return. So, we fill the search string in the past parameters from the cookies. It helps to immediately catch the desired tour - the one that last time. Yes, the price may change, but most likely there will not be a long feverish search for the remembered variant.
Under the strip, we immediately made a summary of the minimum prices. We take them from the cache for a day, so they are not always minimal (in fact, the prices are updated every 15 minutes, and the tours are dismantled), but it is very expensive to update more quickly, alas.
Everything seems to be good here as a whole, the only thing is, perhaps, we will make the choice not “there is a fork for 3 days - there is no plug”, but also 5 days. Alas, it will dramatically increase the load on the requests of tour operators, and, I recall, clever work with cache and queries is the main feature of the engine. We are an avalanche of requests we are able to perfectly put the server of operators.
Search by price
Not all travelers are looking for a destination as our main form suggests. Sometimes the question is put this way: there is a certain budget, it is necessary to keep within it. We have long resolved this issue. On the basis of the same analysis of the cache, they also made a calendar of the lowest prices:
Now, looking at him, I already understand that somehow we put it on the site on the site: it is in the top menu in “ More - Calendar ”. Counterintuitively, while we think what to do next with him. It has long been doing a newsletter with the cheapest tours for those who follow the price (you can subscribe to the main or a specific direction), and another common Telegram channel with the sweetest. With the channel, I’m worried that the wrong thing is being sent now - it’s not the biggest discounts that are needed, but tours within a limited budget, perhaps.
The page is very long, so at the top there is a navigator by country. I begin to suspect that we still need to make a border for the price.
The third scenario of a tour search is when a person wants to tell everything in words, like in the office of a tour operator. Such buyers may be 10-15%, depending on the season. To do this, we have a 24-hour contact center for 90–150 operators and a callback button (“Give me a tour”). Button significantly added transitions, by the way. Just a long distance call still scares people away, and the “callback” doesn’t work like a direct indication why it is needed. As a result, there were generally two buttons: a callback order and a tour selection wizard, which ends with either a call or a visit to a partner’s office in the real world.
An important insight was this:
There is a third paradigm. People often do not know either the direction or the budget, but they really want to touch the bug or go skiing. We help.
searching results
Long loading - for example, in Thailand with a plug for 3 days about 2000 requests for tours are made. During the download, we have the opportunity to immediately show the prices from the cache and at the start we describe the main advantages, so that people understand that this is not just a search, but also a guarantee.
The calendar appears approximately at the third or fifth second of the search, because in the case of a cooled cache, this is a huge DBMS join:
We begin to show options when the search is not over, about 40% of the data.
This is where the problems begin. The fact is that the generally accepted standard of the sphere is grouping by hotels. That is, when you want to rest somewhere in another country, we show you hotels where you can stay. Many in this place think that this is something like a search for accommodation, not a tour, and leave. About two months ago we rolled such a die to make it clearer:
And they also made these small inscriptions on the tour itself, such as “price for 2 adults, flights are included”. Another important point: many show the price for one, for us - for two.
This page is perhaps the most difficult to understand for our customers, but, honestly, I already have such an obscured eye that I don’t know what else to do here. If you look and write how you were looking for a tour, it will help a lot.
There are a lot of problems with filters. As our statistics show, a rare bird reaches the third filter when choosing a hotel. The most important filter for popular destinations, for example, is the distance to the beach. And we have about a hundred signs, which can be used to classify a hotel. What else is the factor of choice for you and in what situations?
Tour page
Here is the tour page. More precisely, the hotel, because it is usually tied to a dozen tours (there are three of them, you can see in the middle block). Upstairs we have a hotel. Already we guess that you need to write something about the tour itself, and not just about the place of residence. We do not yet understand what would be the most convenient.
Under the block with the tours - all the chips and hotel amenities like the availability of free Wi-Fi. This is important for tourists, but sometimes this thing depends on the class of the room, especially if the hotel has several buildings. We still do not know the type of the number, so we show everything from the database. Another point - it is very interesting to understand how you travel to an unfamiliar city using the map of the hotel’s location and what you are looking for and see on it.
Further reviews "TopHotels" (this is the most relevant service without any markups, we pull them up) and ours from trusted travelers. Tell me, do you understand what tabs are there, or does it look like banners?
Here we have nothing about the tour itself, because, in fact, it must also be chosen from the options attached to this hotel. But something must be shown, obviously. If you tell me exactly what you can tell the reader of the site at this stage, it will be very cool.
This is how the tour card looks like, if you go further:
Here, on the advice of the yuzabelist, we turned off all the “background noise” - navigation and even clicks to the logo. This raised the conversion, but I'm not sure that this is completely correct (in case you go back a step).
Reviews
Very important reviews. They make it clear that all this really works. Let me remind you: we have one of the main objections of the first years was that the travel agent in the office in case of what can be beaten, and the operator - no.
Reviews go without filtering (here, for example, a deuce on the main):
As it turned out, it does not interfere at all. People understand perfectly well that when 10 positive and one bad is perfectly normal. On the other hand, when there are 50 positives and not a single bad thing, the legitimate question arises about whether the reviews are not hot.
There are many more cases: traveling with a baby (there is an option in the search), the start is not from Moscow (the default start city is selected by the user's GeoIP), the calendar at the top of the search, and so on.
In general, I would be very grateful if you walked around the site a bit and said that it seems counterintuitive to you.
Thank you in advance.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/325772/
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