Lee Berman
April 20,2008
New Media
Final Paper
The online target market at hand is leisure travel for personal or family use. Traveling and vacationing have always been interests of a wide variety of people with the disposable income to participate. The online competition for the regular everyday traveler is enormous. With countless companies all trying to push their one stop shop services where an entire vacation package can be booked, companies need to make sure their websites are user friendly to all levels of internet users. The difficulty many of these sites have is that each one of their customers is so different on a personal level. Leisure travel can appeal to a person from any kind of background as long as they have the financial means to make it happen.
The first site visited was Expedia.com, which comes up first when the search for “airline tickets” is done in Google.com as a sponsored link. The market communication that the site has is phenomenal. The home page of the site has a few different things to offer. The first and what seems to be the sites most popular feature is the “build your trip” section where customers search for flights, hotels, cars, activities, and cruises on their own. The site also has sections where they broadcast RSS travel alerts keeping travelers up to date on anything that is happening in the travel industry that could affect their travel. The site also has a great section where they have an RSS broadcast of current last minute ticket specials, which can certainly come in handy for some people, with a banner for an instant coupon in the same section. The site also has a section where they help travelers put together travel packages on their own as well as a section for customer service. Customer service is a major part of online marketing and Expedia does a great job catering to this segment. The Expedia customer service has a mailing list that can keep customers informed and an 800 number to talk to a representative at anytime. Expedia also has a page that has answers to commonly asked questions as well as extensive information on all of their services. Expedia’s goal is to “deliver consumers everything they need for researching, planning, and purchasing a whole trip”(expedia.com). Expedia truly lives up to consumers as well as their own expectations in giving the consumer an excellent travel site.
The usability of this site is also very exceptional. One could estimate that fifty percent of the customers visiting this page probably don’t look at anything other then the “build your trip” section on the home page. This section also holds the most customer interaction. This segment is designed to be very self-explanatory. Customers come to this section and request the services they are looking for such as flight destination, dates, number of tickets, duration, other services such as hotels, and rental cars can also be searched in this section. The rest of the site is very customer friendly and is just simple point and click information on anything that could ever be incorporated into travel plans.
The informational architecture of this site is what truly makes it so great from a market communication and customer usability standpoint. Without the foundation of the informational architectural structure of this site Expedia would have a hard time reaching their customers. The homepage itself is very informative, and user friendly making it easy to use for any level of Internet user. Expedia has links all over their homepage pertaining to just about anything relating to travel imaginable. The buttons are easy to read and allow users to navigate around the site freely.
The second site visited was TravelSites.com. TravelSites.com doesn’t do such a great job in market communication. When “Travel Sites” is typed into a Google.com search the site that is actually called "travelsites.com" turns up last on the page. Upon first glance the site looks like a cheap version of Expedia.com designed by an amateur web designer with some of the same key words such as flights, hotels, and cars. The site is not designed nicely and the text is very plain. It’s not until you read the very fine print that the customer realizes they have not navigated to a booking site but rather a site for travel reviews. Travel Sites feels as if they “provide the online travel audience with unabashed, unedited reviews on sites that consumers wanted to purchase travel from”(Travelsites.com). Scrolling down the homepage the customer runs into a list of 50 states where they are to select, which states they would like to view reviews on. Scrolling further there are some cheap basic looking advertisements from some sponsors in plain text. Overall as far as market communication is concerned this site does a pretty lousy job in reaching its target market through search engines. On top of this sites search engine failure it does not do a great job fulfilling customers needs. Once on the site it is not self-explanatory such as Expedia.com but rather jumbled together with all words resembling each other. Beyond all of these downfalls the site has terrible pop-ups, which are horribly annoying.
The usability of this site is also extremely poor. On sites such as Expedia.com customers are given many colorful visual options on ways to navigate the site. The site is very user friendly and interactive. On Travelsites.com there is some great informative information but it is extremely tedious to find it. The menu where a user is supposed to select a state is confusing when combined with the menu asking the customer to select whether they are searching for cars or flights. The fact the entire site is very text oriented along with most of the site being presented in the same color text also becomes hard to stomach after staring at it for more then a few minutes. Beyond all this again the pop-ups that the site displays every couple minutes are enough to make anyone exit the site and look elsewhere for information.
The informational architecture of this site is almost nonexistent. There are no graphics, and the site is almost entirely made up in list format. The advertisements are all in text and look the same giving the users no incentive to even glance at them. The poor advertisements make sense because most of the site is plain and unentertaining as it is. The site is extremely non-professional and looks it. This is a shame because there are actually loads of useful travel information and reviews located on this site. For someone who is not very Internet savvy it would be extremely hard to navigate and interpret this site. If there is one thing learned from this research on online travel, a customer review on Expedia sums it up best “there's always bad things that happen with travel sites, but as long as you confirm in advance, there shouldn't be any problems”( www.reviewcentre.com).
Sources
- (April 20, 2008) www.expedia.com
- (April 20, 2008) www.travelsites.com
- Review By Guest. (April 20, 2008) http://www.reviewcentre.com/reviews-all-8022.html
