Utilising Information Management to Enhance Your Services and Improve Your Product

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Utilising Information Management to enhance your services and improve your product

Sheryl Gatto, Director of Marketing for SABRE Interactive, Travelocity

Alight lets see, everyone talks about how fast things are growing and how theinternet is growing but I want to put a little bit of cold water on this and share with yousome information, yes it is going to grow it will continue to grow but not at the samerate. So I think a continuing growth but a declining growth rate is something thatspeaks to the gentleman at the Trip, my friend at the Trip.com, who said if you'regoing to get into this you need to get into it now. This is when a lot of the earlyadopters, a lot of the mass market is coming on to the internet, and I think that we'regoing to see a much slower growth rate going forward, of course it's going to have abigger base. So you see a 63% for internet users in one year, and then projectingbeyond that Jupiter says that it will grow at about 11.2% annual from the years 1996to 2001. This morning I was trying to down load a slide but I recommend that all of you get a hold of, if you weren't at the focus right conference, there was a very tellingslide that Mediametrics shared with us which showed traffic to travel sites. Itshowed, of course, a huge spike and then it started declining in the summer monthsand I just say that because that is reflected, we do see a declining growth rate. It’sstill growing, it's still a great place to be relative to the steel industry, I'd rather be onthe internet in the travel space, but you're not going to see the same exponentialgrowth. So there's going to be less room for air is what I'm saying.A lot of people ask me 'how are things going at Travelocity and my response is we're just trying to hold on to our hats, the growth is phenomenal, it's sometimes verydifficult to keep up with. But it's fun, but I thinks that's going to change, so just somecold water on the fire I think.This survey was just published yesterday, and last night I included this because Ithought it also was a good reflection of who the target market is for travel sites. Nowthis NPD online, they did a survey of 13,000 visitors to airline travel sites, and this iswhat they found, primarily male, very high average household income. And this is avery interesting statistic one that we only became aware of in the last probably 6months in our own research, that most of the people who are going to spend $300online for an airline ticket, have been online for 2 or more years. So NPD coined theterm they're net vets, so they've been on 70% of the visitors to the airline sites havebeen online for 2 years or more. So this just puts things into perspective in terms of who we're talking to. Let me just move into, I'm sure all of you have heard of theTravelocity, just a brief overview of where we came from. We started in the onlineworld in 1985 with Easy Sabre and Travelocity launched in March of 1996, and asmost of you know, we're owned and powered by SABRE and the AMR Corporation.We have air car hotel full service online booking engine. And we also have, and thisis often time overlooked, about 10,000 SABRE agents who participate on our site inthe online referral directory. And I would say that this is probably our largest un-leveraged asset, and that being the 40,000 or more SABRE travel agents. Andfinding a way because it's something that I think is unique for us, it's a sustainablecompetitive advantage in terms of some of our other friends in this space. And I thinkthat this is a real opportunity for us, going forward in this year. So Travelocity incomparison, you can see we have over 5 million registered members of the site,we've been named the number one travel website by Atplan, you know, I love thesenumbers, I'm sure you enjoy them as much as we do, depending who you ask Atplansays we have 5.2 million visitors, Mediametrix in November said we had 2.4, youknow who knows. We know how many registered members we have, we also knowhow many bookers and that's what counts. We tend to focus, I think yesterday

somebody mentioned an incorrect number for our booking conversion ratios, not anumber we do share, however, but I can tell you however that I am obsessed with it,this is what drives my day. Booking conversion to me is the holy grail of this industry,I'm not interested in traffic, I'm not interested in newbies, I'm interested in people whoare most likely to come to my site, get out their credit card and book. So I think thatthese are all nice statistics, it's also nice to have awards, it's wonderful to berecognised, especially in our industry, such as the National Association of TravelAgents, two years in a row as the best travel site. These are great things but at theend of the day they don't pay the bills. So, with that in mind, what I thought I'd do isuse the case history, a case study of something I've been intimately involved withsince I joined Travelocity in April and that was that this is the product that got us here.We had very very high level navigation, very few links from our home page, we madevery few changes to this design, since our launch in March 1996. I kind of chuckled,where's Lia is she still here today, the woman from British Airways, that everybodyhad the sense that they needed to change the home page but there was noagreement, a lot of opinions, no consensus. And that's pretty much where we werefor a long time, when we talked to our users they loved it, don't change it, you knowand I'll show you some of our research results that sort of kept us in this mode for over two years. I think you've all seen this, it depends again who talk to, Jupiter or Forester, in terms of how big this segment is going to be, but certainly SABRE seethis industry, the online travel, leisure travel segment as something that we need tounderstand and want to participate in, is it a big money market, I think everyone hastold you today no, is that the reason why SABRE's involved in it, may be, may be not.Being the booking engine of choice, I think SABRE feels that we need to understandall uses of it, all aspects, all applications of it, and if at the end of 5 or 10 years weturn around and say well there's no money to be made, we certainly have learned alot and can leverage that to our solutions for our partners. So we'll see how muchprofit there is to be made, I don't think anyone has a crystal ball we can't look into thefuture and determine what's going to happen in terms of commissions and bookingfees and what else.There is a huge opportunity as well in that is Forester's research, they've asked thequestion, what is something that you want to purchase online but have not yet. Andthis I think is a reflection of all the shoppers the lookers coming to the sites, andtravel has the largest I think opportunity available for conversion. And then why don'tthey buy, what are the reasons, I think everybody has seen security, navigationdifficulty, there's not enough selection. I don't trust the name, I'm not sure who thiscompany is. I'm not able to see or touch it, and I think this is more in apparel or hardgoods, merchandise and some people even say they that they feel there's higher prices on the internet. I don't know how many of you shopped at Sharper Image over the holidays but I think that in some cases there may be, but I think in general peopletend to associate buying on the internet as a low cost solution. But there are somepeople about 20% who feel that higher prices are the reason. So we at Travelocity,one thing that I think lends to our leadership position is that we do a lot of research.We invest a lot of money in talking to our customers, and understanding our non-customers and trying to work out how to turn the latter to the former. So we askedour members what it was that they liked about Travelocity, and they said well it's veryeasy to use, it's faster than other mediums that I've used. And I'm more in control, Ifeel I'm more in control of my travel choices I can get in there and play around and Idon't have to feel that I'm burdening or bothering my assistant or a travel agent, and Ilike the fact that I feel like I'm getting low prices. So the question is why, and this wasthe question and why we stayed stuck for so long, you know if a things not brokendon't break it. Well we also found out that there was a large group of people whodidn't like Travelocity and they told us that it was difficult to use, it was very slow, itdidn't feel as though it provided them with all the options, and they didn't feel that the

prices they got were low enough. Such a dilemma, so moving forward what we didwas we embarked upon the unknown and organised a series of focus groups, wealso did some customer surveys, we always look at third party research, and our great customers of Forester and Jupiter as well as some of the primary researchhouses. We also, as much introduction mentioned, look at customer email, wereceive in excess of 2000 emails a day, our customers are always talking to us andtelling us what they think. We have 24 hours response standard, that's our answering standard, typically we average around 19 to 21 hours response for allemails. Most of them going out within 8 hours. But we have a plethora of input andin addition we organised some usability tests we did some limited feature tests,where we would try something on a portion of our site, or try something on one of our co-brands and measure the results. So from all of the input that we received, thethings we heard loud and clear, we want better pricing, we need easier navigation, Iwant you to personalise my description and I need more descriptions, maps, photos,and most importantly we need to be faster. And the problem with research is onceyou get this input then you have to interpret it, and I think therein lies the problem.But let me show you some of the solutions we put in place in version three which justlaunched, the first phase of it launched in November and the second phase launchedDecember 11, I don't think we talked about it, this is the lovely thing about the media,we didn't talk about it in the media until January 4

th

, just to make sure everything wasworking but some of the features of the some of the things that we implemented inthat. This is a screen shot of a hotel listing search that would come before we hadour hotel listing that showed rackrate pricing and static availability. After our version3 implementation now we offered direct connect availability we have real timeupdates on price specials and room availability this was a dire need that we heardloud and clear and was one very large aspect of version 3. One of our email clientscame back to us and said this is great this is like walking into the Hilton lobby andgetting a great deal. As a matter of face I was in New York recently for pleasure and Idid go on to our site and also checked it with Hotel Reservation Networks and somePreview and Expedia offerings and was very pleased to find that the rate that I gotback from Travelocity was the lowest, and then, you know I always have to pull thelast rabbit out of the hat, I called the property, because you can always get a better deal if you call the property, in this case I was not able to get a better deal, as amatter of fact they quoted me a higher price. So personal testimony I'm very pleasedwith the version hotel property listings, and I'll show you some more informationabout that.Navigation if you recall is very high on the list of issues for visitors to site and beforewe had a very high level navigation, it was very confusing, people weren't sure, travelreservations, I just want to book a car, where do I go, destinations - do I go intodestinations and tell you what city I want to book a car in, I'm confused. And we alsoheard that our site was full of travel jargon and it was difficult to comprehend, whichis not surprising if you think about our travel background and our typical audiencebeing travel agents, it's natural for us to use travel jargon. So after the new andimproved we brought each one of the booking paths right to the home page insteadof travel reservations as a category and then you had to go in to another menu whichtook you to flights cars and hotels. Now you go into that right on the home page. It'smeant to be more user friendly, simpler, less layers to get to the information youneed. We also prioritised, this is an interesting process, we sat down and said as acompany what are our strategic priorities what is it that we think at the end of the daywill make us a successful site. And we prioritised those and then we looked at our home page and found that there was not a match up, so when we look at our homepage today and we look at our strategic priorities as a company, there is a directcorrelation, in terms of where things are placed and how they're ordered, where youfind them on the page. You'll also see on the left of the new home page design a lot

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