Helping small tour operators and niche agents with travel ecommerce
A little teaser for next week..... 2 videos on how people research tours using Google
Much much more coming on this next week here on SmallFishBigOcean..... but here, exclusively(!), are a couple of interesting videos watching consumers searching for tours to Egypt. These consumers have never travelled to Egypt....
... and another...
... and another...
Stay tuned - exciting new things coming to these forums next week!
(Videos cleared for public consumption. Don't worry about that)
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by James Penman on -
'Rinky-dink' - great expression. Fascinating watching. I've always been under impression that about 85% of Google traffic was natural search (second user logic) but the first guy seemed determined not to click on organic links. Are there more of those available to watch at a central source?
James
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Permalink Reply by Alex Bainbridge on -
Hi James
Yes - got a number of these :)
Going to announce what we are upto next week though! (And we will be publishing more next week)
Rinky-dink is wonderful isn't it
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Permalink Reply by Dee Edwards on -
Thanks for sharing!
Out of interest, did you deliberately target US people?
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Permalink Reply by Alex Bainbridge on
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Nope, was a bit of an accident. I ticked the wrong demographic requirements when selecting testers.
Ones for next week have UK folk doing the testing! (As have them in the tin already). But next week the focus is on what happens after the customer hits the site - how they get from that to making a booking.
I really didn't mean to do it this way as set a budget (to keep people away from top luxury sites) - but set the budget in GBP - which added an element of complexity I didn't really need.
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Permalink Reply by Tao Tao on -
Really cool, thanks for sharing! What service did you use to do the usability testing or did you conduct them yourself?
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Permalink Reply by Alex Bainbridge on
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Hi Tao
I have conducted a lot of usability testing in the past (of travel websites) and written 3 papers on various aspects of travel website usability.
However, for these tests, I used http://www.usertesting.com/
I had to write the tasks myself though - and that actually is half of the skill. You don't want to write tasks that are standard - and you don't want to create tasks that are so complex no one gets them.
The other half of the skill is the analysis of course. So far just put up a couple of videos without analysis - don't draw too many conclusions from just 2 videos :)
Going to publish lots more next week!
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Permalink Reply by Tao Tao on
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Thanks Alex, looking forward to it. I think we can all benefit from your experience here.
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Permalink Reply by Timothy on
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Excellent idea but why dont you also ask your own forum members to do a screen capture with Freez Screen Video Capture I am sure a few members will do it for you.
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Permalink Reply by Alex Bainbridge on
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Hi Timothy
Yes - could do - but problem is most forum members know quite a bit about small tour operators - so they are not very representative of consumers. I was trying to find people who best represented consumers.
Next week - we are going to announce something that does involve the forum members and these videos. So yes, will be very collaborative! (and, er, experimental!)
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Permalink Reply by Matt Gillam on -
Curious to employ North Americans to search UK sites on Google.co.uk, is that intentional? Tester 2 spent a lot of time trying to change pricing to USD.
Tester 1's site assessment criteria are somewhat random. (Didn't like Travelsphere because the buttons had bevelled edges). And he didn't seem to notice that one of the Nile tours was actually a fishing holiday.
They seemed to value publishing of prominent contact details though - phone, enquiry form and email address - and use that as an assessment of site legitimacy.
Enjoyable, thanks Alex.
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Permalink Reply by Matt Gillam on
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Curious to employ North Americans to search UK sites on Google.co.uk, is that intentional?
OK, I saw your note above, so no.
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Permalink Reply by Alex Bainbridge on
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Yeah I hold my hands up! However it doesn't make that much difference because specialist tour operators (like many using TourCMS) tend to focus on destinations - and multiple source markets.
It is only companies that have to package flights (i.e. flight / hotel tour operators - which are as much tour operators as static caravan sites are caravan holidays) - who care about being very specific about source market distinction.
So doesn't make a huge difference except I would have worded the task differently (with the currency issue) if I had realised I had ticked all testers from anywhere - rather than country choice.
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