Online travel: the consumer’s perspective (3 of 3)

Now that you are making the effort to promote your travel site and convert visitors into customers, you need to understand what goes through their minds and thus insert yourself into their purchasing process.

The third article in this series about online travel involves the consumer’s perspective of your site. It is important to understand who your customers are and those that attracted by your website to ensure that you put the best investment possible into it. You then have to determine which content and which functionalities to make available to your visitors according to your budget, management effort required, and your website’s objectives.

Consumer types

There are two main types of consumer who buy travel products: the cognitive and the subcontractor (for more detail on other consumer types, consult our research produced in March 2005 on the transport of online passengers in Canada).

The consumer with cognitive decision-making processes is of the Internet generation: they want to become a ’specialist’ before they decide to buy. This person thrives on information; meaning that they want to know and understand before even entertaining the decision to buy. They like to use tools to compare prices and detailed descriptions of travel deals. Rapidly fleeing from sites with sparse information or those that only describe company services, this type of consumer costs a lot to please unless you can provide a lower price for a product which they can compare to others.

The consumer who sub-contracts their purchasing decision likes to be influenced and even delegates their choice to a third party if deemed worthy of their confidence. A website that provides a lot of information in a reassuring manner can play this part. This consumer is also less sensitive to price if you have their confidence, and is surprisingly more faithful to providers than his cognitive counterpart.

Which content and which functionalities?

If your agency is primarily virtual and all you want is to sell huge volumes with low margins, you must obviously work to maximise the number of transactions conducted entirely online, to unblocking your call centre and minimising your operational costs in order to always offer the lowest prices. You may therefore find it beneficial to entice both consumer types to rake in more. That being said, the more content you have on your site, such as vacation details with clearly stated prices and conditions, the more you facilitate the consumer’s purchasing decision. With the same objective in mind, you should make it possible for them to compare your prices with those of your competitors to prove that they should do business with you.

If your travel products have a niche (for example a mountain climbing vacation), are more exclusive and therefore more expensive for the consumer but have a more interesting scope, your site will essentially be a tool of persuasion. Your goal will be to convince the consumer that your company is the best for them, and if necessary, make them pick up the telephone if they’re more likely to close the transaction with one of your informed specialists. You will also have more success with the consumer who tends to sub-contract their purchasing decision to a person they deem qualified.

Cost in dollars and energy

It is obvious that the more research, comparison and other technology application functions you add, the higher the implementation costs will be. However, it may be that your site is more automated and therefore potentially less expensive to manage, making it easier to treat a large volume of transactions without human intervention on your part.

If, on the other hand, you put more emphasis on rich content with images and content which is meant to convince the consumer, you must regularly update it; which usually entails the use of a content manager (an application that enables you to manage site content yourself).

I can’t state all the possibilities connected to this, but you should understand that even more important than the starting costs of launching a site, is the consideration of the costs of daily site management: writing, editing and translation of content, photos, site promotions, customer service and support, graphic design and leading expertise which is always necessary according to the extent of the changes you want to carry out.

A website is a new window on your company, as well as your physical travel agency where you welcome customers. Therefore take the time to properly evaluate who your clients are and what they need to make the decision to buy. Remember to provide yourself with the necessary assistance to evaluate and implement your Internet projects.