From On-Site Luxury to Online Excellence: Increasing AYANA's Direct Booking Rate
AYANA, a leader in luxury hospitality offering world-class stays and unique experiences of tranquility and inspiration, saw an opportunity to refine its booking experience to better match its renowned service. The direct booking engine needed an upgrade to increase conversions, reduce drop-offs, and compete with online travel agencies (OTAs).
Our challenge is to increase conversion rates of guest bookings at AYANA Bali through enhancing the booking engine—an essential feature of the AYANA website.
The key lies in translating this unparalleled hospitality from on-site to online, ensuring that AYANA's digital platforms reflect the same level of care, elegance, and convenience that guests experience in person. To address this, AYANA partnered with Sixty Two to enhance their digital presence, focusing on elevating the user experience of their direct web booking engine.
- Customer Research
- User Experience Design
- User Interface Design
Category
- Designing Holistic Experience
- Consumer Experiences
- Hospitality
Countries represented in interviews
Interview sessions, each with 2 activities
User testing sessions across 2 user flows
Optimizing Every Touchpoint: A Complete Booking Journey Strategy
Our approach integrates multiple research methods and strategic initiatives to align every action—from business data collection to user interview synthesis and design validation—with the typical booking customer journey. This comprehensive alignment ensures that insights and actions remain interconnected, helping us identify and address gaps across key booking touchpoints, including Availability Searching, Room Browsing, and Deal Making.
Our Strategy
Analyzing AYANA's Booking Engine with data analytics, along with a competitive landscape assessment, provided insights into the platform, services, and customer preferences to guide our strategy.
By synthesizing insights from in-depth interviews, we identified key opportunities and developed strategies to optimize the booking engine for a user-centered design that meets both customer needs and business goals.
Integrated the framed strategies into design and tested the new experience with users from multiple countries — ensuring the designs improves the digital guest experience and meets a global user's expectations.
User Segmentations from Data Analysis
Our data analysis process allowed us to identify key patterns in customer behaviour, which informed more targeted user segmentation for our in-depth interviews. These behavioural variables such as user demographics, stay durations, other booking and platform preferences were derived from AYANA's analytics which helped us shape a few hypothesis and criteria for research.
- Spending: Small spenders vs. big spenders
- Intentions: Family trips, honeymoons, and friend groups
- Planning Behaviour: Last-minute bookers vs. early planners
- Booking Channels: Online travel agents, AYANA's booking engine, travel agents
Combining the screener form with the in-depth interviews helped us to identify better nuances that happen in-between the user segmentation variable.
I want to book as quickly as possible so I'll choose the best platform that I am comfortable with and trust.
As we engaged with AYANA customers from various countries, we identified three key drivers that influence their choice of booking platform for accommodations:
- Value of Experience: Guests' perception of the quality and uniqueness of their experience plays a significant role in shaping their booking decisions and preferences.
- Sense of Assurance: AYANA guests prioritize feeling understood and supported, seeking empathetic and reliable assistance that ensures their needs are taken care of throughout the booking process.
- Worthy Offerings: The platform guests choose for booking often hinges on how well it delivers the best value, benefits, and exclusive offerings.
These key drivers are crucial in enhancing customer confidence throughout the booking journey, ultimately leading to an increase in conversion rates.
How Might We elevate booking confidence in AYANA and surpass Online Travel Agents (OTAs), by optimizing key decision-making factors?
Informing Design with User Insights: Optimizing Information Architecture
Building on the outcomes from our in-depth interviews (IDIs) through the "Information Hierarchy in Booking" activity, we asked users to organize and prioritize information across key phases: Availability Searching, Room Browsing, and Deal Making.
The insights gathered from this exercise informed our strategic decisions in developing the information architecture and framework for the booking engine. By aligning both user preferences and business objectives, we ensured that the design is intuitive and supports seamless navigation, resulting in an optimized booking experience.
Priority-driven Information: Room Card Anatomy
We focused on organizing information in a way that enhances the user experience by prioritizing what matters most:
- Availability Tag: Availability is a key factor in the booking experience. Users can quickly see if rooms are available, streamlining decisions and minimizing frustration.
- Room Details: This section underwent extensive revisions to ensure the content aligns with user needs. Key information is surfaced upfront, while additional details are kept behind a click to maintain a clean browsing experience.
- Package offers: The number of available deals plays a significant role in users' decision-making. Highlighting multiple deals helps users easily compare options and choose what suits them best. planners
- Price Details: Both per-night and total price options are available by default, allowing users to view pricing in the way that best fits their decision-making process.
Combining the screener form with the in-depth interviews helped us to identify better nuances that happen in-between the user segmentation variable.
Disruption-Free Bookings: Making Search Effortless
Seamlessly integrating real-time updates eliminates frustrating roadblocks such as unavailable dates or rooms, delivering a smooth, uninterrupted booking experience.
Strategic Direction:
- Sense of Assurance: Seamless, flexible search keeps guests engaged and reduces drop-offs.
- Value of Experience: Improving access to availability and personalized options to boost satisfaction and conversions.
Clarity-Driven Browsing: Making Information Instantly Accessible
Strategic Direction:
- Sense of Assurance: A well-structured browsing experience builds guest confidence through clear, digestible information.
- Worthy Offerings: Improving pricing, policy, and benefit transparency to build trust and drive conversions.
Confidence-Driven Booking: Ensuring Clarity at Checkout
No second-guessing at checkout—essential details like pricing, policies, and add-ons are now surfaced exactly when and where guests need them with minimal disruption within the booking flow, eliminating last-minute hesitation or drop offs.
Strategic Direction:
- Sense of Assurance: Surfacing key details at the right moment to remove hesitation and reinforces trust
- Worthy Offerings: Highlighting unique booking values to increase conversion rates.
Our findings from reading data and talking to customers from different parts of the world provided deep insights into customer's booking behavior, enabling us to craft tactical solutions that enhance the booking engine and drive conversion rates. By prioritizing a seamless, visually captivating experience, we ensured the platform remains aligned with AYANA's luxurious brand essence while effectively meeting user needs.
