Hotels.com
Ensuring Hotels.com out-innovate their competitors in a crowded market space
Hotels.com allows
customers to book hotel rooms online and by phone. It has 85 websites in 34
languages, and lists over 140,000 hotels in thousands of locations. It is part
of Expedia Inc.
Hotels.com
commissioned What People Want to run a two-stage ethnographic study into online
hotel booking behaviour: gathering insights on how people approach the planning
of a trip, the resources and artefacts they use (online and offline), the
levels of consultation with others, how they use specific hotel booking sites,
the key influencers on their decision making and the flow of the decision
making process.
An
ethnographic approach
The study combined telephone interviews, a
diary study, and home visits. For a selection of participants we shot video
documentaries.
In
the diary, participants recorded their natural behaviour around planning and
researching their trip. This included details of sites they visited, other
associated influences – such as conversations with friends, guide books, TV
travel shows – and what they thought and felt throughout the decision process.
The
diary was followed by telephone interviews during which the researcher probed
around specific events that arose in the diary for clarification and further
insight.
In
the home visits (shadowing) we observed the context in which the booking process
took place, and observed the final hotel booking itself.
In
the weeks following the home visits, a total of 5 participants were chosen to
be filmed for the video documentaries. The aim of these films is to enable to learn
more about their audience – their needs, motivations and behaviours in the home
Hotels.com environment.The subjects of
the documentaries reflect all the key behaviours we observed in the study
Right up until the very end, none of the
participants knew that the study was being sponsored by Hotels.com
Outcomes
- A series of personal portraits, based on the
people we had spoken to. These revealed, the goals, frustrations and challenges
of the audience which could then be fed back into their internal personas
- The 5 video documentaries, showed the wider
Hotels.com team the full process of booking a hotel at home. Including the
influencing factors and artefacts used
- Our detailed report identified the main unmet
needs and key opportunities, enabling Hotels.com to innovate and excel in this
extremely competitive and crowded market
Services