Increasing holiday bookings with quick wins

Following the establishment of the positive effects of usability best-practice on the business, Bunnyfoot was commissioned to perform a more extensive User-Centred Design (UCD) project for the main Virgin Holidays site.

This project:

• Established customer personas and mental models which helped drive a deeper understanding and awareness of customer needs
• Analysed competitor best practices so these could be incorporated and improved upon
• Generated a new customer-focused information architecture and search paradigm
• Developed a ‘blue sky’ interactive prototype of the site that demonstrated the interactions that the site should support in order to deliver the best customer experience
• Assisted with implementation of components from the blue sky vision as an when was possible given back end and other constraints

Improvements made as a result of the UCD project resulted in a 140% increase in conversions, increases in decisions to upgrade and upsell flights and rooms, and dramatic improvements to measured customer satisfaction for the online channel.

Following the UCD project, Bunnyfoot was then retained as exclusive user experience supplier in a rolling 12-month contract, which delivered ‘on-call’ UX expertise and design support to Virgin Holidays, as well as regular benchmarking exercises against competitors, ongoing testing of new components as they were introduced, and support for other sites across the group.