Today’s travel planner has hundreds of options when researching and booking a trip. With such a crowded ecosystem, loyalty brands in the travel industry must deliver a best-in-class user experience to capture a customer and win a booking - or else risk losing that potential booking to a competitor.  

As the number of travelers continues to climb dramatically post-COVID, customers want to feel confident that they have flexibility when booking hotels and planning travel. That’s why the Rocket Travel by Agoda team works closely with our partners to leverage our travel platforms’ user experience to boost confidence and drive bookings. 

A positive user experience (UX) is a direct reflection of an aesthetic user interface (UI) design where colors, animations, typography, buttons, and icons work together to facilitate an end result. Our teams recently dove deep into customer behaviors on our travel platforms and uncovered an opportunity to adjust the free cancellation callout for certain hotel properties and optimize the header navigation to create a seamless and more confident booking experience, resulting in a combined conversions lift of 4.6%.

When planning strategic UI enhancements, it’s essential to collect feedback from users around the world, ensuring enhancements will improve the experience and conversion rates for the widest group of customers. Experiments led by design provide the opportunity to analyze user behavior changes in real-time from actual customer interactions, quickly identifying the strategic optimizations that yield a positive result and a strong return on investment. As a global company, Rocket Travel by Agoda is uniquely positioned to capture diverse customer feedback worldwide, delivering fast and informative results that can be leveraged on behalf of our partners to improve performance.

In a recent design-led experiment on the search results page of our platforms, our team aimed at drawing users' attention to the hotel properties that offer free cancellation rooms - a major benefit for travelers in the post-COVID era. 

By updating the styling from a gray box with black font to a green box with green font and adding a checkmark icon, our team hypothesized this UI enhancement would allow customers to more easily identify hotel options offering free cancellation, boosting conversion rates. 

The experiment was live for 17 days and drove a 2.4% conversion lift across all participating partners. Through this test, we saw travelers responding favorably to these UI optimizations,  locating free cancellation rooms faster, and generating increased conversion rates for our partners.

To further refine our platform design, the Rocket Travel team developed a second test to monitor the impact of an enhanced header feature. The enhanced header includes a menu of clickable options that persists at the top of the screen as a customer scrolls through the page. This persistent (or “sticky”) header allows users to quickly access important tools as they browse hotel options,  allowing them to easily learn more about a specific hotel, such as the property overview, room options, amenities, guest policies, and guest reviews. 

This experiment increased conversions by more than 7% for some partners, delivering substantial increases in incremental bookings for them. This test also confirmed that the new navigation experience was preferred by the global customer base served by our partners.

User interface testing at scale across multiple travel platforms gives brands the data-driven insights and tools they need to produce actionable solutions. The optimized UI design we deliver to our white-label partners empowers customers with easy-to-use features and allows them to gather information quickly and confidently. This ultimately improves their booking experience and drives significant growth for loyalty brands' bottom line. In a world where millions of brands are competing for consumers’ attention, we are evolving our platforms to anticipate and exceed our traveler's expectations and create best-in-class user experiences for our partners that deliver results.