easyJet

10 essential features for mobile travel sites

Looking for a break on a mobile? Gosh your commute must be especially arduous today.

Here’s some help: a guide to the most convenient features available on mobile travel sites, which could possibly help you find your way to pleasant pastures a lot quicker and also highlight some great design for other mobile commerce designers.

Ben Davis gives excellent advice on features needed for great mobile commerce design in general, which I’ll be using here, but skewing it towards features more suited to travel sites. 

For this feature I’ll be taking a look at a range of travel sites all optimised for mobiles: EasyJet, Ryanair, Booking.com, TripAdvisor, Secret Escapes, Voyage Prive, Expedia, Mr & Mrs Smith, Laterooms and Skyscanner.

How the travel industry uses email marketing

Because I’m a sucker for punishment, two weeks ago I signed up nine different travel websites in order to see how each company uses email marketing.

Here are the sites I chose: Easyjet, Ryanair, Thomas Cook, Secret Escapes, Voyage Prive, Expedia, Mr & Mrs Smith, The Weekenders and Skyscanner.

I’ll be looking at the frequency of emails, the use of subject lines, the email content itself, special offers, editorial voice, personalisation, relevance… All of the many tools that a company can utilise to coerce the recipient to open up an email or even engage with it.

Will this be the equivalent of leaving a skylight open during a storm, or your front door open during a riot?

Let’s take a look at my inbox, to see how it looks right now, two weeks after sign up. Please note, in a rare moment of sensible thinking, I set up a different email address to do this.

Ryanair gives its homepage a makeover

Ryanair was, and is, famous for many reasons; cheap flights, luggage restrictions, perceived sexism, a crazy boss, a refreshing approach to PR, and the list goes on.

But perhaps Ryanair was most famous as the poster child for the upsell, and the doyen of poor UX.

All this might sound harsh, but it is thankfully all changing. Michael O’Leary has been all over Twitter recently talking about forthcoming improvements, particularly to the web, and luggage restrictions, too.

And today, via its Twitter account, Ryanair announced the first stage of its website rebuild, the homepage, is now live.

Are travel brands making it easy for mobile users to contact them?

More than half of the UK’s top 50 travel brands don’t have a mobile optimised site, according to research published last week by the IAB.

Furthermore, although 52% of the top travel brands have a mobile app only 56% of them are transactional, while a third of the businesses have no mobile presence at all.

This means they are failing to provide an important research channel for their customers, as a separate study from JiWire has shown that when looking for information on their next holiday or business trip consumers are just as likely to turn to their mobile device as they are to use a laptop.

Similarly, new data from ResponseTap that highlights a fairly typical purchase journey shows the importance of mobile for travel companies, as customers often browse the mobile web as well as calling travel operators while researching their holiday options.

Ryanair trumps EasyJet and BA for traffic, but fails at user engagement

User experience is a key differentiator in ecommerce as if the process of buying something from a website is enjoyable and convenient then it encourages customer loyalty.

To an extent, it can even overcome the natural consumer urge to find the lowest price.

However for most consumers cost is still the most important factor when making a purchase, as evidenced by new traffic stats from Ryanair.

A study by SimilarWeb into traffic volumes for several airlines found that Ryanair consistently outperforms EasyJet and British Airways despite its obvious contempt for UX and customer service.

We written a number of posts about the shoddy UX on Ryanair’s site, including its hidden costs, irritating upselling, and lack of a mobile site, yet customers are still obviously attracted by the airline’s low prices.

EasyJet email marketing flying high as Ryanair crash lands

In a recent study, easyJet emerged as the third best email marketer of the UK’s top retailers while Ryanair finished among the lowest scorers of the benchmark.

easyJet has had a more interesting ‘marketing journey’ than most, it’s fair to say. The brand has come a long way since it first burst onto primetime television in 1999 as part of fly-on-the-wall documentary, Airline.

Character building? Ryanair, easyJet and chariots of fire

‘Building character’ always sounds painful, doesn’t it? It tends to mean wet camping trips or going on a French exchange at school.

In the world of online marketing, building character can be equally painful, but the benefits are far more tangible.