Kuoni reveals outstanding ROI results
When Kuoni, one of the world’s leading travel companies, commissioned Fortune Cookie to redesign its website, www.kuoni.co.uk, it required more than attractive, user-centric, accessible design and compelling content. Kuoni wanted serious return on investment, in the form of significant uplift in conversion.
Our mission wasn’t to make a failing site succeed. It was to make a successful site even more profitable. And here’s what our redesign achieved in just one month:
- average customer time on site up 10 per cent
- pages viewed by customers up 10 per cent
- ‘look-to-book’ ratio up 30 per cent
- and sales up 40 per cent
So how did we do it?
You’ll find the answer by looking at the innovations we introduced, all aimed at making every user session memorable, pleasurable and successful. Working closely with Kuoni we added a quick, intuitive navigation system; an at-a-glance range of available holiday types, destinations and ‘upsell’ opportunities, and ‘on my own terms’ selection tools, all aimed at giving users a quality, on-brand experience.
Kuoni was the first tour operator to launch a real-time online booking facility, back in 1999. It was the first tour operator to make 80 per cent of its product range bookable online; the first tour operator to offer fast, greener, bespoke electronic brochures and to offer customers the ability to change a booking or quote via multi-channel planning and buying. Kuoni deployed a CMS approach to content management in 2002 and went on to launch five broadband videos for popular destinations. In 2006, came the Kuoni Wizard application, enabling customers to create truly tailormade holidays in North America and Australasia.
From this promising starting point, Fortune Cookie began by reviewing the site’s usability, accessibility, design, language (including calls to action in the content and during the booking process) and – most importantly – conversion paths. Using techniques ranging from a usability audit to a detailed scan of the entire site using Maxamine software, we uncovered a number of ‘findability’ issues that could affect convertibility: brand mismatch; tired, inconsistent design; navigation and labeling problems; information architecture flaws; lack of appropriate content to support purchasing decisions, and ineffective calls to action. It all added up to a weak ‘conversion funnel’.
From this, we prioritised the key elements of the redesign: a clear, powerful content-to-book funnel; a ‘holiday price search form’ for most pages; a ‘pick and sort’ tool to improve search; greater accessibility for disabled customers; greater visibility to search engines; stronger paid slots and cross-sells, and an overall design better reflecting Kuoni brand values. Kuoni has recently reported that customers are now spending as much as £40,000 for a single holiday online.
Fortune Cookie’s USP is our investment in the online travel industry. We help travel brands to innovate online, whether a company is seeking to refresh its online presence, dive into the world of UGC or mine the long tail.
We work to develop a deep understanding of the culture of the companies we work with and to help them get under the skin of new customers being reached for the first time through SEO, UGC and web 2.0 innovations.
To share our thinking and stimulate debate, Fortune Cookie runs bi-monthly travel industry seminars looking at the key issues, from search and social media to virtual agents.
At our recent seminar, Search, Social Media & the Connected Traveller, we invited Kuoni to consider the value of user-generated content (UGC) and social media in the travel sector, and for luxury travel brands in particular.
Kuoni’s UK e-business director, Matt Rooke, shared the company’s thinking on the impact of UGC and social media on the purchase process, and the effect of social networking on customers’ brand perceptions. He argued for a middle way between “a safe, totally controlled ‘walled-garden’ approach”, “a well-monitored, restricted, low-risk ‘open-to-the-public’ approach”, and “a freefor-all, unmonitored ‘Glastonbury’ approach”. “Social networking and web 2.0 are an exciting opportunity for Kuoni to throw open the gates and join in, but it’s all about balance,” he said.
The next
Fortune Cookie event is on Thursday 4 October 2007 and is entitled 'Website accessibility: "the gift that keeps on giving"'. For more information or to book you place
click here.