Case study: Ireland’s landing page on booking.com
Project developed for Aela’s Master Interface Design course
Briefing
This project’s briefing was to develop/redesign a landing page for a product/service offered by a well-known brand active in the market, captivating user’s attention through compelling storytelling and presenting a clear call-to-action to impulsionate decision making. The result should be a non-responsive standard desktop-based web page design.
For this project, I chose to study, analyze and develop an improved landing page design for Ireland on booking.com, in order to promote some of the country’s tourism and leading to the booking of stays, tours, and attractions through the interface.
DISCOVERING
Booking.com
Whoever you are, whatever you’re looking for, we have the perfect place for you
Booking.com is nowadays one of the largest and leading online travel companies in the world. It started as a small Dutch start-up and has grown to become a giant platform for hotels, flights, trains, busses, tours, rental cars, airport taxis, and restaurant bookings around the globe.
Through ever-growing technology, Booking.com connects travelers to businesses, transportation, and experiences, living up to its mission to make it easier for everyone to experience the world. The platform is available in 44 languages and has over 29 million listings worldwide.
Targeted Marketing Strategy
Booking.com is continually fostering innovation through new technology and data measurements, improving the overall online experience, and connecting its 02 biggest market segments: travelers and businesses.
As for travelers, whether with business or leisure purposes, the company is constantly looking at what customers are searching for from the site, as well as how they behave throughout the interface. Booking.com’s marketing strategy focuses on the value it’s providing to consumers, based on pricing, destinations, and selections, and targets them with channeled advertising online. It is noticeable over the past few years a positive growth in eco-conscious/friendly journeys since travelers seem to be more interested in trips with meanings and positive impact on the planet and on themselves, for example. Women-only group travels also seem to be strongly increasing over the past few years, a reflection of a growing support system between women from all over the world. And solo travels are boosting full steam ahead as well.
As for businesses, Booking.com offers lots of data to help boost sales and take them to the next level. Through Booking.com Analytics, businesses have access to real-time reports to help monitor past and future sales, target customers, and competitor analysis. That’s also how Booking.com itself knows that travelers nowadays are more passionate about exploring a variety of different stay experiences, and especially that diversity consumers are looking for is what the company is focused on pushing upwards, so they have the option to choose from luxury resorts to B&Bs to even treehouses.
The future of travel
Let's be honest: traveling will never be the same again in the post-pandemic world. Sounding a bit apocalyptic, nearly everything we know has been impacted by the Coronavirus (COVID-19) and so has the tourism segment. Having suffered a huge hit, travel businesses are only now starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel and are having to adapt to much more demanding travelers than before.
In research commissioned by Booking.com in 2020 with adults from all over the world about their future travel plans in the year to come, unfollowing the crowd seems to be the most prominent thing of all, with 51% saying they’ll avoid traveling during peak season and 63% that will be avoiding overcrowded tourist attractions. 36% said they’ll be looking for alternative travel suggestions and 69% said they’ll prioritize spending time outdoors, enjoying nature and simple pleasures.
In addition, travelers will expect a significantly higher level of safety precautions and health measures overall, as well as increased values coming from travel companies, such as policies for refunds, cancelations, and more flexibility with online bookings and purchases.
But one thing is sure: having spent so much time home for the past few months has left most people with an urge to travel as soon as possible and try to make up for the time “lost” in 2020. Hopping online to escape reality for a moment and search for inspirations for future travel destinations have become a sort of a hobby for those quarantined indoors, and Booking.com has computed around 65 million (!!!) travel wish lists over the past year. So it’s a great opportunity for travel companies to get more creative redirecting travelers to undercrowded destinations, offering off-season travel packages, and prioritizing outdoor natural resources on their own platform.
People’s desire to travel will never change, the only thing that might change is where they go to.
The Luck Of The Irish
Why did I choose the Emerald Isle to be the star of this project, you ask? Well, Booking.com’s Ireland page seems to be a bit underrated in comparison to other locations, focusing mainly on accommodations, with not even the country’s capital Dublin showing up amongst the top locations on the overall homepage, or even amongst Europe’s big attraction cities. And since Ireland took over my heart countless Moons ago, I saw it as a great opportunity to possibly boost Irish tourism, since those green fields really have a way of speaking to your soul.
Competitors vs Internal Analysis
Booking.com sees competitors’ growth as a positive thing, claiming that it encourages the constant innovation, testing, experimentation, and optimization of the user’s experience on the platform, in order to deliver the best resources possible to its consumers and business partners.
Since none of the competitors seemed to have a specific landing page related to boost tourism in Ireland (or another country, for that matter), I based this research purely upon general content to verify what was displayed throughout the web pages to get user’s attention and what wasn’t, and what we could prioritize on the landing page design in order to promote the country itself and all it has to offer to travelers, leading up to more online travel bookings.
The company’s biggest competitors and how they provide services and information for their users through the interface are airbnb.com, expedia.com, and tripadvisor.com.
Check the complete benchmark and internal analysis on the Miro board:
The most interesting insights we can get from the analysis are:
- Ireland doesn’t have a designed tourism page on booking.com, airbnb.com and expedia.com; on tripadvisor.com it does have one (a quite nice one, may I add); neither one has an Irish landing page;
- General Irish tourism isn’t as boosted as it could be on 2/3 of the competitors, neither on Booking.com;
- Great opportunity to generate leads and redirect possible travelers to Ireland, since the country offers numerous outdoor natural resources destinations that seem to be much more undercrowded than other places;
- Great opportunity to also promote eco-conscious/friendly trips and solo trips, possibly aiming to target more women as well;
DEFINING
Persona
Very much grata
Being that Booking.com offers a huge variety of travel options, accommodations, tours, and so on, its users also vary from all the enormous diversity worldwide. For this project, based on the data collected by Booking.com’s travel research and on the potentially growing market segments we analyzed earlier, I opted to create a 01 persona model for whom we could shift the landing page’s focus to. I’d like to introduce you to Amelia.
Assuming that Amelia’s critical contact point with Booking.com would be the landing page itself, for now, I decided not to embark on a customer journey map, since we already know that that’s where we need to focus on to really get her (and all other possible travelers’) attention and drive decision making at the moment.
Goals
What is desired for Ireland’s landing page design to have then?
- Compelling storytelling inducing possible travelers (and Amelia, of course) to book trips to Ireland;
- Promote Irish tourism as a whole, but focusing on ecological and undercrowded destinations;
- Enable travelers to already explore a bit of the country through the interface itself, with maps, photography, and more;
- Focus on all the gems Ireland has to offer that seem to be overseen on competitors’ web pages;
- Possibly target solo travelers and/or women (groups or solo) (yes, you, Amelia);
- Have a clear call-to-action inviting consumers to book trips to Ireland (go on, Amelia, book an Irish trip now…)
DEVELOPING
Wireframes
With our analysis as a base and our goals in mind, making sure we stick to a landing page design, I came up with 02 possible wireframe options for this project, which are also analyzed and noted on the Miro board. I created a list of must-haves for this landing page’s structure, which are:
- Title + heading + hero shot + inicial call-to-action;
- A brief and captivating introduction to Ireland;
- Destinations within the country (focus on undercrowded and natural ones) + photography;
- Recommendations and testimonials by other travelers;
- Possibly an extra about things-to-do/other destinations/attractions;
- Closing argument + final call-to-action;
The chosen one was actually a mix of the 02 wireframe options since some elements from one seemed to work really well with some elements from the other one. The overall structure does follow the same pattern as we established with the must-haves, you’ll be able to see it in just a bit.
Booking.com’s Style Guide
Booking.com’s UX team itself confirms that all of the website’s looks and actions are based essentially on A/B testing with users. So, if some piece of information is placed over there or a button looks the way it does over here is because they tested it know that that’s the way it works best at the moment.
We already know that Booking.com doesn’t have a specific landing page design for Ireland, but from our previous internal analysis we can identify that the overall webpages do have some notable characteristics that are applied throughout. For the final prototype, I aimed to make sure that the base of our design really did follow those characteristics as much as possible, like with the grid base and typography hierarchy, for example. In addition, I built a mini style guide on which we could support the rest of the visual decisions.
DELIVERING
The Irish Prototype
With all the information, analysis, goals, wireframes, and style guide on hand, the final result came to be the following:
*overall analysis also on the Miro board.
And you can check the interactive prototype developed on Figma right here:
At The End Of The Rainbow
Yet another great project experience for me. I’ve been really impressed with my progress through research, definition, and development so far, but I do know that there is still a lot to be learned and improved. That is great because it keeps me going and aiming for more.
Glad you joined me for this one and hope you’ll keep me company on my social profiles. Ah yes, and may the luck of the Irish be with you 🍀
Aela — Editorial Aela.io — https://medium.com/aela — aela.io
