Thomson Holidays was losing at least £1.5 million a year in “lost bookings” on its website after failing to identify a series of problems with user inputs and data capture. The operator has admitted the errors after the successful installation of a new system which tracks the user journey through a web-based booking and flags…
Thomson fixes £1.5M-a-year website errors
Thomson Holidays was losing at least £1.5 million a year in “lost bookings” on its website after failing to identify a series of problems with user inputs and data capture.
The operator has admitted the errors after the successful installation of a new system which tracks the user journey through a web-based booking and flags up areas where potential customers may have abandoned a transaction.
The system from US-based technology firm Tealeaf is believed to have reduced the amount of time Thomson engineers spend on fixing ongoing problems by 50% as well as improve booking conversion rates by 20%.
Tealeaf identified a number of major areas in the booking process including an inability to recognise hyphens in customer addresses (such as Weston-super-Mare), which would return an ‘invalid’ message to users.
Thomson said this problem alone was leading the company to lose around £30,000 a week in abandoned transactions.
TUI Travel new media director Graham Donoghue said: “We spend a lot of time, effort and resources driving people to our website—we don’t want to lose them because of a poor experience.”
Tealeaf has since launched a new service called CXresults, which tracks user behaviour on a site over a period of time.
Geoff Galat, Tealeaf vice president of marketing and product strategy, told Travolution the travel industry is more susceptible to online user journey errors more than any other industry.
“It is more common in travel because it’s a more complex business and the high number of complicated and different elements of technology being used online,” he added.
