laterooms

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.

UX problems I had booking my holiday (and why I need a bumbag)

In this post, or seamless meld of my personal and professional lives, I will highlight a few user experience blips I found when booking a holiday to Austria.

On reflection, it occurs to me we might all be over-excited about new developments online. Wearable technology and cross-channel CRM are both all over tech and digital marketing news, but how far are we from websites working to the user’s satisfaction?

As progress brings more examples of ‘good’, the ‘bad’ becomes even more annoying. The whole experience of booking my holiday left me realising that one of the main benefits of package holidays remains the same: they take the hassle out of having to interact with more than one service/company in the travel sector.

None of the company websites I used were bad at all, in fact, I was impressed by OBB (Austrian Rail) and Olotels, but the cumulative effect of small user experience hiccups meant that booking tickets and accommodation filled an evening with moderate pain.

Can a holiday ever truly be ‘last minute’ until travel sites are optimised further? Here are the problems I faced…….