At Rocket Travel by Agoda, it’s our mission to continuously adapt to the ever-changing travel industry. In order to achieve this, our teams constantly look for opportunities to improve our search platforms to better align with evolving customer behavior and make the travel booking process as streamlined as possible.

Our team recently identified an opportunity to improve our platform’s mapping interface and boost bookings in the process. By using the standard off-the-shelf mapping features available from Google, we weren’t seeing the expected density of hotels, and it was difficult to identify hotel options around key destinations and landmarks. By leveraging proprietary internal Booking Holdings hotel mapping, we had the opportunity to create a more seamless shopping experience with a denser and more enriched search, limit search latency, and allow for a more specific point of interest searching. By creating a more delightful shopping experience, we aimed to grow overall bookings and therefore performance for our partners as well.

Our team launched the new product enhancements in a limited experiment to gauge the results before deploying changes system-wide. As with most everything here at Rocket Travel by Agoda, we wanted to be certain this superior shopping experience for our customers was backed by data. By using data to guide our decisions, we are making sure that we are driving revenue for our partners as well as creating a better overall shopper experience, and measuring the unexpected. This process allowed us to identify concurrent opportunities to further improve our supply, delivering not only a more positive user experience but an improved shelf of products available during the travel booking process.

Through testing and leveraging data, we now have a hotel map search with enhanced features and functionality, supporting a better customer experience for our partners and their audience. We will continue to monitor the performance of this new feature and also continue to use the scientific method to  continually improve our product in support of the customer through every stage of the travel journey.