It used to be relatively straightforward to predict annual online spending habits in the travel industry.

January and July would form two travel “peaks”, with spending rising as holidaymakers book time off for the following summer or winter.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the events of this year have made 2016 a different story.

NB: This is an analysis by Duncan Keene, UK managing director of ContentSquare.

First Brexit, then Trump. These events took the world by surprise, with fluctuations in markets and consequently consumer confidence.

Online spending habits, which for the most part have been fairly predictable, have been increasingly erratic and, in the online travel industry, ever-present security threats across Europe have acted as a constant dampener.

An opportunity

It’s important to remember that it’s not all negative, and that turbulent markets create opportunities.

Data collected by ContentSquare from numerous European online travel agents (OTAs) suggest that more continental European travellers are looking to Britain for holidays in the wake of a weaker pound, with the average value of purchases to UK destinations climbing by 38% in the weeks after the Brexit referendum.

It’s important, therefore, for travel brands to fully capitalise on the website visits that they do receive.

Travel is a highly considered purchase, and the experience that your users have on your website (UX), matters more than in other industries.

The issue is that many travel brands are still making common UX errors, which, in this uncertain environment, could mean the difference between booking and just another abandoned holiday cart.

The “how” and “why”

Fundamentally, the key here is for travel companies to go beyond traditional website analytics to understand how and why customers are behaving in a certain way on their website.

It’s difficult to decode emotive purchases at the best of times, and in an increasingly uncertain world, it’s even harder to predict.

Ensuring that easy-to-understand insight into online user behaviour is shared throughout the business, and not just IT, will mean the entire team is focused on making the customer journey and experience as clear and seamless as possible.

It’s a funnel thing

Booking on travel sites is often a complex process, with a user journey, or ‘funnel’, that is much longer and more arduous than other sectors.

Our data, collected from 12 OTAs and 75 million sessions, suggests that exploratory sessions on mobile last nearly five minutes, and eight and a half minutes on desktop, substantially longer than other sectors.

This generates significant challenges in terms of UX optimisation – users find it difficult to modify their search or change information half way through the funnel without having to restart the entire process, which understandably generates frustration.

Travel companies need to look carefully at where users are dropping out, and include some encouraging or helpful information at the right stage.

For example, our research found that 62.9% of online users read customer reviews during the 10th browsing session.

Recognising this, and providing appropriate content at the right point, will keep users engaged.

What’s more, if you can identify specific points in the user journey where your visitors are frustrated, features such as progress trackers or page bookmarking can really help.

It’s also very important to refrain from overloading your user with information, as this can easily be overwhelming.

Our data suggests that travel brands which split the information up over multiple pages fare better, as it’s clearer to the user what the required action is.

No two visitors are the same

Travel is a highly emotive purchase, and no two buyers will have exactly the same desires or destinations in mind.

It’s strange then that many travel sites treat all visitors exactly the same. Visitors to a travel site may be a solo businesswoman, a couple or a family for example, and in each different “traveller cohort” they display different behaviours, especially pertinent in different countries.

Some visitors will be impulsive, requiring little time or information in order to make a purchase, while others will visit the website multiple times on desktop and mobile, checking all the terms and conditions before committing to a purchase.

The challenge for travel brands is making one website work well for a dozen or more different types of customer.

The first step they need to take is to adopt analytics tools which enable them to segment their users into distinct cohorts based on their online behaviours.

Once this is enabled, brands can then start to begin to deploy UX implementations to make the online journey for that particular cohort smother.

Catering for returning users should be prioritised as our data suggests that returning visitors are two times more likely to convert.

A deep understanding

The key, therefore, is to ensure a deep understanding of your site’s users and ensure their journey through your site is as seamless as possible.

This goes beyond traditional metrics and, perhaps more importantly, this needs to go beyond just the ecommerce team.

Including the importance of data, and the importance of the user’s experience, throughout the entire company is of critical importance for travel brands, and this applies as much for the content team as it does for the CTO.

The brands that ride the wave of turbulence and thrive will be those that truly understand not just how users behaved but why and how they did so and deliver experiences accordingly.

NB: This is an analysis by Duncan Keene, UK managing director of ContentSquare.

NB2: User experience image via BigStock.