Case Study - Hotel Booking websiteMy Boracay Guide is a hotel booking website focused on the Philippines prime tourism destination, the island of Boracay. The site was by the end of 2015 still using a User Interface crafted in 2010 which looked dated and its UX presented many barriers to conversion (hotel bookings) and, more so, on mobile, due to its lackluster responsiveness. The business of My Boracay Guide was losing ground fast towards global competitors such as booking.com, agoda.com and airbnb.com despite keeping a strong SEO/organic traffic position but a decreasing conversion rate and an increasing cost to acquire users via Adwords due to increased keyword competition.

The new normal absolute must for the tourism sector is the golden triangle: Immersive and incredible pictures that can be seen fast on any device, real user reviews, competitive prices.

Altar.io discussed issues and solutions

1) Low hanging fruit (Conversion Rate Optimization on the old site)1) Reduction from two to one checkout page2) Better calls to action (bold Book Now vs unremarkable “More Info”)3) Increased confidence building aspects on the site including real testimonials on the site4) Better usage of the Live Chat functionality

2) Structural changes: Complete new UX and UI, tech transformation1) Complete re-build of the responsive experience (UX/UI) that looks and feels like 20152) Change from Code Igniter PHP to Ruby on Rails 3) Entirely new Secretary, CMS and Analytics Dashboard

The best part: Results:

Overall conversion Mobile conversion Pages per session

+ 122%

+ 72%

+ 40%

- 20%

Average load time

Mobile: A simple, immersive, beautiful and image rich experience that makes you want to be in the hotel already. Mobile users had a bad responsive experience with the previous website which meant that despite being 32% of users they generated only 14% of bookings, now, with much better conversion rates the investment on this vertical the mobile vertical represents 42% of the users and 24% of the bookings.

Change in the period 22-29 December 2015 vs 22-29 November 2015Pages per session: 3.62 vs 2.9Bounce rate: -2%Goal conversion rate change (bookings): +122%

Tablet: Often overlooked, the new responsive design enables the 10% of visitors to now have a good experience on the site. The dramatic increase to 5 pages on average per session and the tripling in conversion shows that the right choice was made.

Change in the period 22-29 December 2015 vs 22-29 November 2015Pages per session: 5 vs 2.9Bounce rate: -2.5%Goal conversion rate change (bookings): +243%

Desktop: Last but not least, the Desktop users had been until now 60% of the traffic and 80% of the bookings. With the new site marketing is now finally being able to profit from investing in Adwords focused on the cheaper mobile traffic, generating more bookings for less and reducing reliance on the more expensive desktop users. Desktop is now 49% of the traffic and 66% of the bookings and the tendency is that both become lower over time.

Change in the period 22-29 December 2015 vs 22-29 November 2015Pages per session: 6 vs 3.9Bounce rate: unchangedGoal conversion rate (bookings): +66%

Analytics + Agile Development: Nothing is ever final in consumer facing software. In launching myboracayguide.com we launched an unfinished product that is just the beginning. Every week or every two weeks we discuss, devise and launch new ways to break barriers to conversion and ways to save time to the backoffice users who update hotel information and add new hotels.

Another critical feature for the management is to have a quick access to the site’s KPI’s/Analytics including sales velocity, bounce rates per page, daily and weekly evolution so that new ways to improve conversion further can be quickly devised and tested at near real-time.

Thank you altar.io - December 2015