What would you do with Hotwire.com?
June 22nd, 2007
I love to travel, as you’ve probably guessed by a few of my blog posts. Every so often I check out the various travel web sites to find out if they’re doing anything new, what functionality they’ve added, and if they’re offering any deals. Lately I’ve been interested in the “multi-city” flight option, where you can book flights to 3 or more cities in one sitting.
Using this option, Expedia.com, CheapTickets, priceline.com, and Orbitz all allow you to book 3 flights, Travelocity allows you to book 4 flights, Kayak allows you to book 6 flights, and Hotwire.com? Well, while they list “multi-city” as part of their search functionality under the flights tab…
…they’re quick to tell you that they “don’t offer fares for multiple destinations,” and redirect you to Expedia.com after a few moments.
Why advertise a service you can’t provide directly on your site? Why not incorporate Expedia’s multi-city search functionality on the Hotwire web site? Why even list it all? What would you recommend Hotwire do to fix this?
June 22nd, 2007 at 2:52 pm
What would I recommend? Hire a good interaction designer and listen to him/her.
June 22nd, 2007 at 6:55 pm
[...] Ashley McKee points out how Hotwire.com advertises a “multi-city” search functionality that it actually doesn’t have, and asks what you recommend Hotwire do to fix it. Source: [Link] [...]
June 25th, 2007 at 7:15 am
Classic post. I couldn’t help myself but to have a look at flight booking engines in New Zealand… aahrgs, it’s so shocking: http://www.bloginblack.de/archives/000870.cfm
June 25th, 2007 at 11:08 am
And I thought Hotwire was bad. Thanks for pointing out those sites.
I did a search for a flight from Hamilton to Chicago through House of Travel and Hamilton never appeared in the results…it automatically searched from Auckland to Chicago. I know you can fly from Hamilton to Auckland. I wonder if smaller countries are resisting the move to book travel online rather than book with an agent to prevent job loss.
House of Travel also has an interesting slogan: “How Kiwis see the World.” Hmm…
June 25th, 2007 at 10:43 pm
Let me begin by saying that I’m a designer too and would definitely care about the user experience and either not advertise the service on the site or integrate it well with expedia, but we need to keep in mind that for business folks there is much more than design, if you think from a Product Marketing perspective the first thing is more users (eyeballs), revenue and things of that nature. The second problem is that sometimes it is not that easy to integrate services from two different companies into one, the backends can be different, etc. End of the day the business people will measure this OK user experience of sending user to a different site by number of reservations…they may say it was great we got X number of reservations from Hotwire, let’s advertise more expedia services on Hotwire.
To make the story short…in the business world there is much more than design and we designer need to show the business world the ROI of any design recommendations, only then things will change or every business school should have a required course on Usability or User Experience.
June 26th, 2007 at 9:50 am
I think my gut instictinct would be to be hesitant about advertising the service without the functionality, but if the business wants it sometimes it’s hard to say no.
If it were me doing it and the business really wanted something before we had the functionality then I thiink I’d push for a spot of A/B testing. Admittedly not easy across domains, but it’s one of those things that there’s not much precedence for and you’ve got an almost unlimited ability to alienate users.
If it were possible with expedia and you had the capability to get accurate figures on conversion, I’d want to trial it that way and keep a close eye on how different implementations where going, and if there was any benefit in advertising the option at all. May let it run for a day, then review and repeat until comfortable with the solution.
June 26th, 2007 at 11:03 am
I’m assuming there’s a business agreement to forward people to Expedia for multi-destination/multi-flight. I might also presume that Hotwire is one of Expedia’s subsidiaries, but that’s largely irrelevant. What I’d say is that if they want to make the handoff more transparent to the user, I’d get ahold of an API for Expedia, and parse the information directly to Expedia. If Expedia was willing, I’d try and get Expedia to provide me with the same service they do now, but utilize our branding. That would make life a little easier for everyone.
June 26th, 2007 at 8:47 pm
Hi there – I manage the User Experience team here at Hotwire and first off I wanted to say that I’m enjoying this conversation. It’s always good to hear other people in the field talking about your site.
Multi-city and one-way flights are features that users often look for, however, our current business model does not support these features. So rather than completely have them missing from the site (potentially causing user frustration and abandonment) our approach is to call out the features in the place that the user would expect to see them and provide a means for users to access them through Expedia (our parent company). We do message that the user will be leaving the site once they click.
Keep the feedback coming… thanks.