Travel site bookings fly when glitch fixed

Usability testing software has helped a holiday company boost its sales by spotting a glitch in its website's navigation that could have been costing it tens of thousands per week in lost business.

Thomson Holidays is a subsidiary of TUI Travel. It sells more than five million holidays and flights per year across a range of channels, including a portfolio of 650 high street shops. Customers have increasingly embraced the internet as a way of buying holidays and Thomson's web offering is a key part of its showcase.

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Thomson relaunched its thomson.co.uk website about a year ago, with a new search engine capable of navigating customers to the most appropriate holiday packages at the centre of the new design.

The investment in the new site by the company ran into the hundreds of thousands of pounds, so being reassured that it was having an impact on growing the business was very important.

The company implemented a suite of customer experience management tools from usability testing specialists Tealeaf in early June last year. Unlike conventional user acceptance testing tools, which report an aggregate of user behaviours, the Tealeaf software captures every movement the customer makes on the site, giving a much richer impression of their experience.

Thomson Holidays ecommerce manager George Nolan said: "The traditional testing products tell us a lot about what is going on in the site but they don't give us a lot of information about how many attempts to purchase are failing and why. That information is very important and the timeliness of getting the information is paramount. Tealeaf is real-time."

The software identified that the search engine had been set up so that it didn't recognise odd characters in searches, such as hyphens. This meant that any searches with hyphenated town names came up with an invalid search result. Consequently, Thompson could have been losing as much as £30,000 per week in lost bookings.

The improvement in the site's usability as a result of using the Tealeaf has meant that buyer-to-browser conversion rates have risen by 20 per cent.

Nolan said: "We spend millions on bringing people to the site. Why wouldn't we spend money on making sure they can actually buy something when they are there?"