Getting customers onto your website – be that a mobile, tablet, or desktop – is the first goal but the holy-grail, as we all know, is securing that all important booking. So how are the biggest brands in the business doing it? Pamela Whitby reports from EyeforTravel’s online marketing, mobile and social media conference in Amsterdam

Make small changes and use your data wisely. Test and learn. Move with the [mobile and social] times. But most importantly put your customer at the centre of everything. These were the among the key messages delivered this morning in Amsterdam by four of the world’s biggest travel brands: Disney, KLM, Expedia and the Wyndham hotel group.

Gillian Corley, Head of Marketing Disney Destinations International, UK talked about this global brand’s journey to make its four websites more usable and customer friendly. “Big changes are great,” she says, “but in fact the smaller changes add up far more quickly.”

Among her recommendations: ensure the website is clean, polished and uncomplicated. It should be platform and browser agnostic, the landing page should be simple and have a user-led design that generates an emotional response (think great images, inspiring content).  In addition she advises firms to constantly test and maintain trust. In five years, as a result of implementing these changes, Disney conversation rates have gone from 0.3% to 2.5%.

Here are just three examples of how optimising the web experience worked for Disney. 

•     Implementing blue and orange colours on the website saw click-through rates increase and boosted the bottom line by around a million pounds.  

•     Offering people a price-per-day rather than a price per week increased conversions by 8%.

•     Using recognised Trust signals on its website led to a 50% increase in conversions proving that security really is a big issue for users. 

Of course mobile is also a big issue for Disney with traffic rising from 13 to 25% over the last six months.   

Driven by data

When it comes to web usability Sheldon Chuan Product Director, Site Experience Expedia Inc says it is important to recognise that travellers are not your only customers.  Brands have multi-dimensional relationships from hotels to rail companies, car suppliers and so on. “Your customers are everywhere,” he says, and “your online real estate is precious”.   It is therefore essential to use data cleverly in order to optimise your website. “Without data you can’t understand your company. It’s your biggest commodity, so use it wisely,” he says.

Like Disney, Chuan argues that small changes can lead to big wins. By displaying important information in the hotel business really can make a huge difference. Something like parking availability or Internet costs policy displayed clearly can lead to big wins.  By doing this for parking information, Expedia saw a 0.6% increase in conversions and displaying Internet costs led to a 0.9% increase in conversions – a significant boost to the bottom line.

So Chuan’s advice: build a website that caters for rapid prototyping (it must be possible to make small tweaks and changes quickly). Test it and if it works roll it out and then scale it.  And of course remember that “mobile is here and now”.

Risk and reviews

Hotel companies it seems are increasingly looking to reviews to drive bookings. After all, all research points to the fact that good reviews can double conversion rates. The thinking is that by showing reviews on your own site, customers will be more likely to book directly on your own site. 

Martin Smith, Director of e-Commerce EMEA Wyndham Hotel Group, says his company has recently partnered with TripAdvisor to show its reviews. Because this is a fairly new, and some would argue risky, approach, Wyndham started small, exposing a small number of loyal guests to TripAdvisor reviews. Importantly, there is no link through to TripAdvisor as the aim is to keep users on site.  So far the results have been promising.  Hotels that ran the test saw 9% increase in bookings. “It is a fairly small sample and it is still early days but it backs our hypothesis that reviews work,” says Smith. Hotels with reviews of between 3 and 4 on TripAdvisor saw the biggest increase in bookings, hotels rated over 4.5 appear to have less room to benefit, while 2.5% fare least well.

Reviews are now being rolled out across Wyndham brands in North America and will be coming to Europe early next year.  The group is also adding TripAdvisor reviews to mobile websites and apps though these are tailored for the mobile experience.

The company is also using TripAdvisor to conduct post-stay surveys, some of this information is published but some remains proprietary and is sent to hotels trialling the system so that they can drive improvements in the guest experience.

In 2011 Smith says Wyndham hotels had 100,000 reviews but by partnering with TripAdvisor it is expecting this to grow to 1.5million by 2013.

Old dog and new tricks

Last up was Rob Zwerink Director of e-Development KLM, Holland’s 92-year-old airline. Because airlines are mobile by definition, its biggest focus right now is mobile; research shows that 85% of leisure travellers are using their mobile phone abroad.  “When it comes to new services we want to be a mobile first company,” he says, and it is looking closely at content and usability to achieve this.

The company, which launched its first mobile website two years ago, is rapidly changing and evolving to meet today’s challenges and opportunities, exploring a range of ways to generate traffic via mobile and convert this to bookings. 

EyeforTravel will be looking at KLM’s mobile strategy in more detail in the coming weeks but for Zwerink mobile is here. “Today 17% of our online visitors come from mobile (both phone and tablet) and within in a year we expect that will between 25 and 30%,” he says.

While conversion of mobile visitors may be still much lower than online bookings, the growth potential is there. This is one of the biggest challenges facing travel brands right now, says Chris Buckley, Director of Social Engagement at TNW, as the rewards from investing right now may be relatively small but the long-term opportunities are huge.  

In the end the choice is yours.