March 8, 2023

Mapping Enhancements to Drive Results

By
Nick Armstrong

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.

The opportunity

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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.

The results

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.

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.

About the author

Nick Armstrong is the Vice President of Product at Rocket Travel by Agoda. With more than ten years of experience in travel technology, he leads the team of engineers responsible for prioritizing platform enhancements to drive growth to Rocket Travel by Agoda and our partners.

March 20, 2024

Mapping Enhancements to Drive Results

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.

The opportunity

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.

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.