- Posted: Dec 17, 2018
Booking Experiences
UX Discussion | Wednesday, December 12, 2018
There’s a new development in the travel industry that offers the sale of activities through sites that used to only handle transportation and lodging like Expedia, AirBnB, and TripAdvisor. Now, customers can book tours, events, and other experiences from the same place they book their rental car and hotel room. Many of these activities coincide with the new fad in travel that focus’ on experiences that are unique and embedded into the culture of the place.
Today, Lucid Travel discussed these new developments and how something similar could be implemented into Lucid. The discussion focused on finding a reasonable way to offer suggestions for our clients that would make booking through Lucid into a valuable experience.
Lucid believes that booking travel should be an easy and efficient process. We looked at AirBnB to see how someone would go about scheduling an activity and found that AirBnB now incentivizes experiences over lodging. The website is designed to book an activity before a room, though most people look for a place to stay first, and then worry about what to do. We also found that all of the activities offered – while certainly unique – were very expensive. This seemed contradictory as well, considering that AirBnB’s success is due their ability to provide an affordable alternative to hotels. We thought a more efficient way for AirBnB to sell experiences would be to offer budget activities and incentive the sale of products to generate more revenue, otherwise the client might as well stay in a hotel with the amount of money they would be spending on activities.
The important things Lucid learned from examining AirBnB is to know who our customer base is, and to keep things simple, efficient, and reasonable for them. The majority of Lucid clientele are athletes traveling in teams. We assume that they are probably not looking for leisure experiences, but rather good places to eat and ways to bond as a team. They are also most likely on a budget and a time schedule. Lucid thought that we could provide each team with a list of the top three restaurants and sites of interest in their destination.
The list would look something like this:
3 of the best rated restaurants
3 of the best rated budget restaurants
3 sites of interest
Of course, the sites of interest should be free places, such as college campus’ or famous landmarks, and should additionally adhere to the team’s schedule and demographics. Ultimately, the list should merge culture, budget, and fun. From this, we hope to provide value for booking through Lucid, making it into an experience of its own and eliminating the need for the customer to personalize their trip.
Our major takeaway was that user experience doesn’t start and stop when they are using your product - it’s the user's entire experience, start-to-finish.
Author: Willow Groskreutz