Integrating the online booking to a tour-based travel agency
Context
Infinit Tours is a Romanian travel agency that offers guided car tours to some of the most touristic places in Romania. Their offer includes 6 destinations that are covered in tours of 1 day, 2 days and 7 days.
Besides the guided tours, the company also runs airport transfer services and it happens frequently that the two services overlap since they’re demanded by the same client.
Requirements
We were asked by Infinit Tours to redesign their presentation website, with the main goal of rethinking the booking experience for both the customers and the I.T. operational team.
Another essential requirement was to link the two websites - tours and transportation for both users and I.T. admins. I.T. customers could jump from the tours-website to the transportation website under a common account and I.T. admins could easily track all the reservations.
The main problem we had to address was the ineffective reservations process
In the old website, the online tour reservations happened through a contact form displayed in the tour presentation page. Moreover, some clients would submit their reservation inquiry through the contact form from the contact page, which would result in a much longer time dedicated to the client-consultant discussions and to other extra reservation formalities.
The other problem emerged as a consequence of the missing booking process and resulted in business distrust and low customer engagement
This issue was determined especially by the main problem - the lack of an online booking system. It was difficult for the users to fully trust the website and further engage in buying its services since the reservation process was so vague and hardly noticeable. A lack of confidence is also generated by the fact that the website didn’t offer a clear user journey, but instead, it showed a bunch of information that simply couldn’t be digested at once.
We designed the booking process to be displayed as a step-by-step set of inputs and actions, following a logical flow and also allowing the user to easily understand what data is required from him.
We focused on keeping the booking simple and clear, so we provided the user with full control over the data added. The user can - at any time - switch to a previous step and edit the data added.
Before committing to paying for the booked tour, the customer is being displayed the booking details, with all the data he provided so far. He can choose to edit some - which would redirect him to the correspondent step, or he can further proceed to payment.
The booking status can be followed from the user's account that has been created along with the booking process. The booking details available in the user's account also enables communication between the two parts - the customer and the company.
One of the project's objectives was to increase the confidence level of the website. We identified many flaws, that once addressed and right implemented, would help in achieving that goal. Providing a clear booking process instead of the current ineffective reservation message was the first task we approached.
We also identified the benefit of the testimonials that would allow potential customers to see what other people think of the tours and read stories about real experiences people had with the company. We integrated the company's profile from Trip Advisor into the website's reviews system so users that share a common email for both the website and Trip Advisor to be able to share their reviews on both the website and the review platform.
