Reading Between the Data
Client: Booking.com
How looking at “new” data led to a new innovation.
It’s easy to confuse optimization with innovation. As we add new features to products, and occasionally get lucky enough to see a rise in active users or revenue, we end up patting ourselves on the back before doubling down on the tools we used to get there. We fixate our gaze on conversion rates, email open rates, session times: metrics that tell us how existing features are performing.
But sometimes to find a new idea, you have to look at new data.
Mining for Insights
Methodologically, there isn’t any rhyme or reason, other than to get crafty with how you compare, slice and dice different variables, with a focus on spotting outliers. If you see a vast majority of your users doing something — no matter how seemingly irrelevant — it’s usually worth looking into. There won’t be an epiphany around every corner but, eventually, something will pop.
For Booking.com, the world’s largest hotel booking platform, it was this: every 5 out of 6 hotel rooms booked in the U.S. are within a 3-hour driving distance from the customer’s home.
Even a basic knowledge of the travel category hints at why this is insightful. Paris. The Caribbean. Dancers in grass skirts and drinks with little umbrellas in them. These are the images you see in travel magazines and websites. The entire category is built around driving demand through inspiration; the more exotic the inspiration, the better.
With that in mind, seeing via the data that 86% of American travelers are taking short road trips, within a 3-hour drive from home, revealed just how tragically far off the whole category seems to be. It revealed an opportunity for innovation.
Piecing Together an Idea
Running with that data, we kept digging for related pieces. We saw that customers were mostly booking three day weekends. We saw them starting their search for a room about 30 days out, and we saw them booking the room itself just 2 days out.
Weekend roadtrips. Within a 3-hour drive. Booked last minute. That, in and of itself, became the idea.
Knowing that people book 2 days out means that we can give them an experience built around immediacy; trips that are available now. Knowing that most trips are over long weekends, we can automatically filter to a list of hotels that have Friday thru Sunday occupancy. And since we know that most people are looking for something within a 3 hour drive, we can offer a truly “immediate getaway” in a single click, because the logistics of getting there involve nothing more than punching an address into your GPS and hitting the road.
We called it Booking Escapes. In a sense, it’s a bit like an Uber for travel, which has never been done before. We kept the same sense of discovery that is the hallmark of the travel category, delighting users with undiscovered vacation spots that are a mere drive away, while using smart data analysis and experience design logic to enable a completely new and immediate way to book a vacation.
