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Travel search needs a revolution

August 16, 2012 | Online Travel

With standard conversion rates for online travel bookers languishing at just 0.5% - around four times less than “traditional” ecommerce - it’s hardly surprising that travel search has become the subject of considerable industry focus and much technological development.

Until now, anybody wishing to book a holiday online was more often than not faced with filling out complicated search forms. This meant that individual wishes and requirements could only be vaguely specified and most results were not really relevant to what was actually being searched for.

But a number of technologies have come onto the market in the past 12 months that look to try to change this. Hipmunk, for example, is a travel search service that allows customers to search for their flights and accommodation using visual tools and graphics. The site is designed to help people who are overwhelmed with pages of irrelevant results when searching for holidays, with flight results being presented in a visual "timeline" and hotels being shown on a map. Interestingly, the company recently received a $15m venture capital investment to develop its product.

In Germany, former airline HLX, now operating as a travel search portal, offers a “meta meta” search function to give people a broader view of the market. HLX not only searches the airlines but also searches other aggregators to offer visitors the guaranteed lowest price – it then redirects them to the relevant websites. They have also made certain improvements in the search functionality.

Probably the area getting the most coverage at present is mobile travel search. eMarketer reports that nearly 16 million Americans will book travel via mobile devices this year, with that number projected to grow to nearly 37 million by 2016.

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