CRM and Loyalty Strategies in TravelA recent study indicated that one-third of travel consumers abandoned their online search after waiting for more than four seconds for their results to load.

Published: 28 May 2008

CRM and Loyalty Strategies in Travel

A recent study indicated that one-third of travel consumers abandoned their online search after waiting for more than four seconds for their results to load.

From a price comparison site's perspective, assessing website content strategy and the role of technology in achieving optimum results, Francesca Ecsery, UK General Manager, Cheapflights.co.uk, says the technology underpins the gathering and delivery of travel deals to consumers.

"It is important for the systems architecture and implementation to be clean and, on one side be focused on gathering and maintaining fresh travel deals and content efficiently, independently of the other side which must be structured to retrieve and deliver travel deals and content rapidly. Layered on this is the website architecture that must provide consumers with an innovative and intuitive user interface that evolves with features to support the increasing demands of consumers. It is important to have and maintain this clear and delineated distinction so that the systems can be independently tuned for responsiveness, collectively deliver web pages in milliseconds, with the ability to scale as the business grows," Ecsery told EyeforTravel.com's Ritesh Gupta.

According to Ecsery, who attended EyeforTravel's Travel Distribution Summit Europe 2008 in London last week, there are two main challenges for travel companies when it comes to delivering significantly faster page and application download times while increasing the quality of the customers' web experience.

The first is for keeping travel deals fresh and up-to-date in real time and available to serve those fresh deals to satisfy the web page download times demanded by consumers. The second is to provide great (advanced) user interface features to aid the consumer in selecting, identifying and filtering travel deals, but without impacting the page download time.

Site performance and site scalability continue to be core issues for growing travel content providers as they focus on increasing their online bookings and building customer loyalty.

On the new trends, Ecsery said the age-old approaches of load balancing and clustering continue to provide base-line scalability across many of today's systems, and these technologies have continued to improve along with availability of higher capacity multi-core server technologies.

"However, these technologies only provide additional scalability headroom to legacy systems, whilst in the longer term these systems need to be re-structured and re-factored to be focused on today's travel business needs and to be maintainable and scalable. Travel businesses continue to gather customer preferences and web site searches and in the next few years will look to provide improved personalised features for travellers, whilst using these gathered preferences to demand different travel offerings from their suppliers," she added.

Considering the explosion of video, social networking and user-generated content, Ecsery says travel suppliers should first consider what value each would add to the user's experience, as well as what content already exists in the market.

There are advantages to increase UGC and video on sites as it will be beneficial in driving traffic through natural search, but at this stage the content must be unique as there is an enormous amount of content that already exists, she said.