The Thinking Traveller Uses Bloomreach Web Optimization Tools to Increase Booking Inquiries +33%

Story Behind the Brand

The COVID-19 pandemic hit few industries harder than travel as mandated government lockdowns kept many travellers home for most of 2020 and some of 2021 as well.

The Thinking Traveller has been voted the top villa rental company in the world five years in a row and aims to be the first port of call for those wishing to book a quality villa experience in the heart of the Mediterranean. But for the 1+ year where most people weren’t leaving their homes, that left the company with a significant challenge in re-engaging a customer base forbidden from using its products.

uplift in submitted enquiries amongst the test variant compared to the control group who did not see the shortlist guidance card

Challenge

As COVID-19 derailed the travel plans of people across the world in 2020 and parts of 2021, The Thinking Traveller needed to adapt its communications strategy to enable more varied and engaging content to retain customers.

Solution

While travellers were stuck at home, The Thinking Traveller did some planning for when travel would eventually re-open. Rather than sit back and rely on what it had done in years past, it opted to dive deeper into the functionalities of Bloomreach Engagement, which is hosted on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

The added use of web optimization and experiments helped the company to better understand how customers were navigating the website and better inform development strategies on the website based on tested and proven strategies. This included testing to drive further villa reservation enquiries and therefore generate more leads in the sales funnel.

One of the areas of testing and new tactics tested was the “shortlist guidance card” that would appear next to an available villa listing for seekers in the test group.

The shortlist guidance card was created using Bloomreach Engagement’s experiments functionality. It helps inform the seekers on the details of how to submit their shortlist of top villas they were interested in for their vacations. The Thinking Traveller hypothesized that seekers would submit more shortlists when being made immediately aware of how the function worked.

We are always looking for ways to improve our customer experience and be more efficient with our development resources. The web optimization and A/B Testing which Bloomreach provides has allowed us to not only increase our enquiries but also test whether functionality is worth rolling out permanently. We are really looking forward to what we can do next.

Dale Bray

Digital Marketing Manager, The Thinking Traveller

Results

After a 10-day test period, the initial hypothesis was proven correct in a statistically overwhelming way. There was a 33% uplift in submitted enquiries amongst the test variant compared to the control group who did not see the shortlist guidance card. That represents a significant number of additional leads entering the sales funnel.