Getting Vacation Bookings Back on Track
The company
Classic Vacations is a luxury vacation wholesaler based in California, USA.
The challenge
The Ecommerce product team was tracking a puzzling drop in online vacation rental bookings.
The company
Classic Vacations is a luxury vacation wholesaler based in California, USA. They take pride in their reputation for incredible customer service built over 40 plus years. Their award winning online tools are used by travel advisors to book luxury vacation packages at thousands of upscale hotels, vacation properties and resorts around the world.
The challenge
The Ecommerce product team was tracking a puzzling drop in online vacation rental bookings. Revenue was down 86% week over week and the trend was accelerating. They suspected it was a technical issue but since product support was unable to replicate the issue the engineering team did not know where to begin investigating.
The solution
They decided to investigate the user experience to find answers. Using Glassbox's experience analytics solution, the team took a 3 step approach to dealing with the issue.
Locate friction points in journey
The first step was to locate where customers were struggling in their booking flow. In the struggle dashboard they identified a step “show property details” with an unusually high number of struggle events such as dead clicks and rage clicks. Filtering on these events revealed the impact of the struggle on abandonment and revenue.
Visualize experience
Replaying sessions with these events showed users searching for vacations by area and then clicking to show more details for a property but the content was not displayed. Not only was this the proof they needed to get the engineering team moving, it also gave them technical performance information such as the specific searches and problematic API calls.
Share insights with other teams
With this detailed information the engineering team put a fix in place quickly instead of spending time reproducing the issue. The customer support team could also reach out to customers affected and help them finish their bookings. Moving forward the product team plans to monitor for upticks in struggle events like these to catch them before they impact revenue
Outcome
Their online vacation rental bookings are back on track. They are taking the learnings from this event to ensure their new booking system for hotel properties is a smooth experience for their customers. They will be monitoring for struggles and errors that arise to quickly fix them and identifying areas to improve conversion rates and revenue.
Our experience using Glassbox to troubleshoot our Vacation Rental booking flow was invaluable. Not only were we able to quickly pinpoint the breakage, we had visible evidence for our engineering team. Going forward, we plan to monitor for struggles and rage clicks immediately after launching any new product - it will be a game-changer for us, especially when we don’t have time for a full Beta test.
Results
Identified, diagnosed and visualized a technical error causing a drop in conversion. Proactive monitoring further increased confidence in new product launches and enabled more efficient collaboration between teams.
