Booking a package holiday
It was the first few weeks back at work after the Christmas break and we were thinking of going to Florida.
This was a big step for our family. We’ve never flown with our kids (we have 3 children aged 7 and under), so the last time I used any sort of website for a foreign trip (other than a business trip) was a long time ago.
As someone that has spent most of his career designing websites and digital things I had reasonable expectations.
Just tell me what everyone else does
We didn’t really know what we wanted. We just had an idea that it would be nice to take the kids on holiday and that they would like to go to Disneyland.
I’ll be really honest, I just wanted to know what most other people do when booking this type of trip.
I’ve got enough to think about without really wanting to plan every last detail of a family holiday. I definitely had little interest in booking a ‘unique experience’, how is that even possible if you’re planning a long distance trip to a theme park like millions of other people?
So what do other people do when going to Florida with children to visit Disneyland? Do people drive to the resort when they arrive? Is that even allowed, or is there some sort of park and ride, shuttle? If so, do they get the hire car? How does that work with car seats for the children?
In the end we started to search for holidays on different websites. A fun night in for any married couple. We’re dealing with school holidays. Does this mean everything works Saturday to Saturday? We had no idea, or maybe we should be searching Friday to Friday?
The first searches we tried didn’t bring back great results so maybe the usual thing was Friday to Friday. Should we have known that, we had no idea? We were searching 7 days/nights to start with, then 10, then 14 – but really had no idea how this works.
We were confused about where we were in Florida. Where should we be based, there was too much choice? We wondered if we’d get to explore. How far it was to the coast/beach? We looked at maps on google and wondered what other families do. Surely they don’t spend 14 days solid at Disney. That doesn’t sound like fun.
We weren’t sure what the weather would be like in February. Were we planning a trip in hurricane season, I’m sure I remember that being a thing in Florida?
We wanted to know if direct flights to Florida were a thing from the United Kingdom. We didn’t want to configure the connections.
I just wanted to feel like I was doing the right thing. We wanted to feel that our family would be looked after. Most of all that a dream trip wouldn’t be stressful.
The most frustrating thing was that we just wanted to see some options. We knew the dates for the school holidays but that wasn’t enough. I can’t help feeling that this would have been enough for a walk in travel agent 10 – 15 years ago.
We had no benchmark for pricing. We knew what we could afford and our motivation for going was all there waiting to be tapped into.
Understanding the need for a travel agent
The job of a travel agent is to handle the details. I’m willing to pay a premium for the reassurance that someone else is willing to invest the time so all the details are taken care of.
The best travel agents answer all the questions above, they remove the pressure and create the reassurance that creates a sale. Yes it’s sales, but it’s also the purchase of a necessary customer experience.
I’m not sure anyone has really thought about these needs when designing the experience of booking travel online. Did anyone really think about what made the offline experience of the travel agent work so well, for such a long time, then think to themselves “how can we take the best of this making the most of our digital opportunities?â€
I won’t name names. We tried about 4 or 5 different travel sites, some of which I have booked with before, all were familiar names to me which was important.
The job of these products should be to take the constraints of my situation and to use these to get me to something I’m going to want to purchase. The user need for travel agents is to bring to the table the domain knowledge I don’t have.
This is why design matters
I wanted someone to solve the problem. And I was willing to pay them to do it.
When companies don’t design for the needs of customers they lose money. Fact.
If I have to tell you the exact details of what I want before we even get started no one is going to win. In my own personal experience of buying anything significant I probably have to see what I need before I want it.
That’s what being a customer is about. As a customer I don’t know what I want. I know I need a family holiday that going to work out well for everyone concerned. I can tell you the constraints but you still have present a better set of options back to me.
My prediction. The first travel company to be bolder and not build their experience around a self-serve customisable search based site will win big.
Update Summer 2016: We never went to Florida in February. Maybe next year.
This is my blog where I’ve been writing for 18 years. You can follow all of my posts by subscribing to this RSS feed. You can also find me on Bluesky, less frequently now on X (formally Twitter), and on LinkedIn.