Service
Booking journey optimisation.
Most sites lose the guest somewhere between ‘I like this’ and ‘I have paid’. That gap is where your margin lives, and it is measurable.
Why it matters
The gap between interest and payment is the whole business.
Travellers spend over five hours with travel content across the forty-five days before they book, viewing an average of 141 pages6. By the time they reach your property page they have seen dozens of alternatives and they are not browsing — they are deciding.
A tenth of a second of mobile page speed is worth around ten per cent on travel booking rates5. Sixty-one per cent of accommodation bookings now happen on mobile2. These are not marginal numbers, and almost nobody in self-catering is measuring against them.
Detail
What the work involves.
Where journeys leak
In our experience it is nearly always one of these six.
- Availability hidden behind a click, a tab or an iframe that loads late
- A date picker that fights the thumb, or resets when the guest changes party size
- Prices that appear only after dates are chosen, then change again at checkout
- Changeover and minimum-stay rules enforced at the final step rather than shown in the calendar
- A payment page on a different domain, in a different typeface, at the exact moment trust matters
- No trust signals anywhere near the button that takes the money
How we work
Measure, prototype, test, ship, measure again.
- Funnel instrumentation first — step-by-step events, so the argument is about data rather than taste
- Session review across real devices, including the slow ones
- Prototypes tested with people who match your actual guests
- Changes shipped in small increments with before-and-after measurement
- Monthly reporting against booking rate, not against page views
What we will not do
Some common advice is worth ignoring.
- No fake scarcity counters or invented ‘three people are viewing this’ badges
- No hiding the total until the last step to improve a mid-funnel metric
- No dark patterns on cancellation or insurance opt-ins
- No test that cannot reach significance being reported as a win
Questions people actually ask
Straight answers.
Can you optimise a website you did not build?
Yes, and often it is the better first project. If the design is sound and the integration works, a focused conversion programme is far cheaper than a rebuild.
We will tell you honestly if the site is beyond optimisation. Some are — usually where the platform itself is the constraint.
How long before we see a difference?
Instrumentation takes a fortnight. Meaningful data usually takes two to three months, depending on traffic volume.
Low-traffic sites cannot A/B test reliably. There we work from best practice, session review and qualitative testing instead, and we say so rather than pretending the numbers are significant.
What do you actually measure?
Booking rate by step, drop-off between steps, device split, time to first price, and revenue per session.
Not bounce rate, not average session duration. Those tell you very little about whether someone booked.
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