Dear Resort Booking Engines, What if You Added This One, Tiny Feature to Your Platforms?
Gregg Blanchard /
A while back, in a moment youthful exuberance, I decided to act on my frustration with a motel’s booking engine and try to design my own. Something that was simple, responsive, and fit my needs.
After a large slice of humble pie, this is what I ended up with (these are three layouts depending on screen size, not three parts of the same screen):
While it leaves much to be desired, I want to draw your attention to an idea that, once visible, was hard to stop thinking about: favorites.
My Habits (May not Be Yours
Now you lodging folks have the browsing and searching data so you know better than I would the potential usefulness of such a feature, but whenever I plan I trip I do a lot of searches for lodging.
In the case of a trip to Telluride last fall, that happened entirely on the Telluride website. With dozens of options, my wife and I found ourselves asking the same question over and over:
“Which one was it that we liked so much?”
Faced with such uncertainty, it made me wonder if the listings we browsed looked like this:
Instead of this:
What if, as I shopped, I could highlight my favorites and then, with a single click, view just that list?
Or, even more, what if I could browse properties FIRST and THEN SEARCH DATES with the results only being pulled from my list of favorites?
More Value from “Carts”
Online retail sees similar behavior with adding products to their carts, but lodging doesn’t use the same “cart” principle even though “abandoned cart” campaigns exist for partial reservations.
In that case, a favorite button would provide value to both the searcher and the marketer.
The searcher would have a better experience when deciding which property to book and the marketer could use favorites the way a retail site uses items in a cart as content for an abandoned cart campaign.
Food for Thought
Maybe searchers have already found a way around this, maybe they use bookmarks in ways I’ve never dreamed.
I can filter by price, I can group by this, I can exclude by that, but I can’t filter by what I’m actually interested in. That to me, would be incredibly useful.
Maybe it’d be useful to someone else too. Food for thought.