May 25, 2023

Boosting Conversion Through Testing and Experimentation

At Rocket Travel by Agoda, our curious team is constantly innovating by asking questions, testing new features, and developing experiments on our platforms to deliver customers the best-in-class travel booking experience. By redesigning how we present information about the available room types, we successfully optimized our customers' experience when selecting a hotel room and increased our conversion rate by 5%.

Pushing the boundaries

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As a global company, we work with many suppliers that provide different offers for the same room type. We recognized that the previous layout could make it difficult for customers to compare rooms due to the sheer breadth of supply we are able to deliver to our partners.

We hypothesized that we could improve our customers' shopping experience by grouping room rates by room type, making it seamless and effortless for the customer. We wanted the customer to easily compare and shop for the hotel room that best suits their needs, which would ultimately lead to an increase in conversion rate.

Finding the answers

After identifying the usability issue and determining a possible solution, we tested an enhanced room grouping experience across all platforms, enabling us to gather data from three different customer segments:

1. Customers who booked hotels to earn miles or points

2. Customers who redeemed miles or points to book their hotels

3. Customers who booked through our discounted sites.

We ran the test for a few weeks, with 50% of our travelers booking their reservations by selecting a room offer within a corresponding room type (the new proposed design), and the other half continuing to book hotels through our regular rooming list.

By providing our customers with a new experience when choosing their hotel room, we increased conversion by 5% amongst the customers who booked their hotel to earn miles or points. Moreover, as we ran this experiment, we collected data that helped us assess not only the impact of the test on conversion rates but also understand customer behavior across different devices, and gathered valuable insights to compare customer behavior between new and returning users.

In-depth consumer journeys drive engagement throughout every phase of the customer lifecycle. A robust suite of transactional emails ensure customers have all the information needed at their fingertips from booking, to check-in, and post-trip. Dynamic cross-sell strategies allow us to drive high attach rates with other travel products offered by our partners, generating incremental bookings and boosting the value of each trip, and abandoned search and welcome series ensures customers understand the value of our partners’ travel platforms and stay loyal to our partners’ brands.

Personalized content leveraged throughout our emails, delivering a unique experience for the consumer. Our personalized email communications ensure each customer has all the information they need throughout their travels, easy ways to contact our customer loyalty team for assistance, and suggest travel destinations based on their personal travel preferences. This adds a level of convenience to the consumer experience and drives engagement with our partners’ brands.

Utilizing AI is quickly becoming a cornerstone of email marketing. Using artificial intelligence allows our marketing teams to quickly drive innovation through A/B experimentation. In testing, we have found it to be very effective at driving results and are developing new ways to leverage this emerging technology as email marketing services continue to expand.

Segmenting audiences based on previous engagement data to deliver new messages to the customer and drive continued engagement with our white label platforms.

Robust reporting enables us to continually optimize the performance of our campaigns, and keep partners informed of success and areas of opportunity at every phase of a partnership.

Asking "why" to understand what we learned

While the experiment was successful amongst customers who booked their hotel to earn miles or points, we learned that the users who redeemed miles or booked hotels through our discounted sites preferred the experience of the default version of the platform. By gaining a deeper understanding of our various customer segmentation, we decided to maintain the enhanced room grouping experience on our accrual platforms only. Today, you can experience this platform enhancement by booking hotels on Rocketmiles.com, our flagship consumer facing earn-only product.

Every experiment we run provides invaluable insights about our users, their preferences when using our sites, and opportunities to drive growth for our partners. As we consider future experiments, we will be collaborating with our design team and will conduct a deep dive into this functionality to determine the direction of future platform enhancements that will support our customers throughout their travel journey.

Whether we are testing a new design to display room offers, enhancing our platform by improving our mapping interface or streamlining the travel booking experience through our cutting-edge unified cart technology, our data-driven team of experts is constantly looking for opportunities to innovate while maintaining a customer-first, partner centricity mindset.

About the author

Angie is Director of Product at Rocket Travel by Agoda with 25 years of travel industry experience. She has extensive experience in product management, leading product teams to deliver travel software solutions for B2B partners and end customers.