Content, it seems, is no longer king. User experience is high on the agenda as ‘lookers’ seek more a compelling offering. “I spent 40 minutes online trying to book a trip to White Plains, New York, with United Airlines. But the site kept telling me an upgrade wasn’t available. It shouldn’t be as difficult as this to book a flight.”
“I’ve spent four hours researching a single trip to Germany, and I still don’t know if I’ve got the best deal.”
A couple of not-so frequent flyers, you might think, who are not used to booking travel online, and have yet to cut their teeth on travel websites. Actually, no. These two quotes are from Henry Harteveldt, vice-president and principal analyst for travel at Forrester Research, and Joe Buhler, senior destination marketing analyst at PhoCusWright, two of the world’s leading analysts of the online travel market. >>Full Story
Thoughts// Okay, so that headline is just for dramatic effect. As a follow-up to yesterday's article (User-Generated Content Is Dead), our friends at Travolution posted a quick comment highlighting the article above, 'User experience - Time for the personal touch.' A great follow-up and a very well written article...thank you David...that we wanted to call attention to.
While I am the first to say that content is key, especially unique, engaging content, there does come a point where 10, 20 or 100 websites will have the same content as yours. And guess what, that probably already happened.
For example, how many ways can you creatively say that your flight to Milwaukee is $172? Or that the Washington Monument is 555ft tall?
The way you begin to differentiate yourself from the competition is user experience. And a combination of user experience, engagement and content will set your site apart.
Enough of my comments, I would highly recommend reading the article.
Long live the user experience!
(Editor's Note: Special guest appearance by the 'Burger King' made possible by your local Burger King restaurant.)
2 comments:
Thanks for the coverage.
And glad it struck a chord with you.
Sure, content remains important and with my DMO background I've long been convinced of that but it needs to be presented in a more exciting and user friendly way. One without the other doesn't work for today's increasingly web savvy shoppers.
Appreciate picking up the topic.
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