Curating post-booking experience for MakeMyTrip Hotels
“A big goodbye to all“ — says our previous post-booking details page, which was designed half a decade ago. The scope of services expanded to ensure an awesome stay for our hotel users. The following was an attempt to embrace the evolution that had happened over these years.
Post-booking experience is the key to retaining users: by building trust, assurance & a sense of brand reliability.
In today’s digital world when everything is at our fingertips, our existing post-booking experience had a hard time maintaining its sanity as a self-serve platform. It was functional, but with the expansion of the product horizon, the experience took a back seat.
With the redesign, we aimed to breathe life into the fundamental experience — to make post-booking a reliable ‘one-stop solution’.
The gaps & cracks, recognised
Riding on the enormous data collected from the existing experience and additional insights from our research, we identified two broad themes that we wanted to attack:
- One was ‘Organising Information’ — putting it in a better structure and weaving context seamlessly on the page.
- The second was ‘Improvising the existing’ — which involved improving the current self-serve to empower our users.
Let’s look at how we addressed each one of them.
Information, reorganised.
Designing to ease anxiety
While post-booking is primarily supposed to be an intent-driven place of action, research shed light on the human side of it. A lot of users came to the booking details page just to confirm their stay details and reaffirm their hotel choice. And kept returning — again and again.
Three simple yet effective things that we did to cater to this user behaviour were:
- Firstly all the important booking details, scattered throughout the page, were compiled into one booking summary. We wanted to make sure the user could see all the relevant details at a glance without having to search each time.
- Each phase of the booking process has different primary intent, such as collecting reviews once the stay is complete or extending support to the user while at the property. So, to make these actions visible, we dynamically stitched these intents to the booking summary card.
- Lastly, we synchronised all three touch-points where users can get booking confirmation: App, Email, and WhatsApp. Design is often about communicating effectively. Each touch-point followed a similar structure to create familiarity & induce reassurance.
Defining the Navigation Paths
The hotel’s post-booking details page is the hub of all possible actions related to a booking.
According to our data, ~70% of users engaged with the booking details page had a defined actionable intent.
This means, they knew what they wanted to do — modify the booking (change the dates, add or remove guests), cancel it, or do something else. This fact makes the easy discovery of actions on the details page crucial.
Targeting the basics first, we tweaked the structure of the building block — the card. To enable easy scan through the page the card heading with icons became anchors.
To ease the discovery of these modification actions, we introduced something that was coined as “thoughtful redundancy”. This redundancy takes its foundation from our realisation that most actions had dual associations. Let’s understand it through an example:
While looking to change dates, some users went about looking for a global booking modification card, while some looked for it near the stay date information.
To us, both of these associations made sense! So, we let our design cater to both of these models by having two CTAs for the same actions.
What might generally be considered a design sin — redundancy, in our case, worked wonders! Our approach was validated when both CTA’s had equal contributions to overall modification, post-launch.
To further enhance the discovery of relevant actions, the position of the cards was decided dynamically in real-time based on the phase of the booking. For eg: when check-in approached, directions to the property location become important so it was pushed up in the sequence.
Improvising — Toning up the existing
Life happens. Will the refund happen too?
In the cancellation flow, high drop-offs from the refund calculation screen signalled that users entered the flow just to know the refund amount.
The first instinct was to put up the refund amount upfront on the cancellation card itself. But we quickly moved on from this iteration because it felt more like a persuasion for cancellation. Also, Cancellation being a high-impact action, directly getting into the flow provokes anxiety.
Hence, introducing a secondary CTA “View Policy and Calculate Refund” helped users avert anxiety and also easily see refunds without entering the flow.
Effectively communicating the cancellation policy builds transparency. Hence, we restructured the cancellation policy from a mere block of text to an easily comprehensible timeline view.
Within the cancellation flow, another goal was to facilitate the decision-making for choosing the mode of refund. We wanted the MakeMyTrip wallet to have a higher share of refunds. It aided a better experience as the wallet refunds were instant and helped our retention metrics.
By highlighting quick refund time and other benefits, we were able to gain a whopping 100% increase in the wallet share.
Knowing why people cancelled?
In our cancellation flow, we did not collect user feedback & reasons for cancellation. Our email feedback collection had poor open rates and even fewer responses (1–2%), which hindered our understanding.
To bring in this understanding, we introduced a step for asking the reason on the cancellation success page. With 90% of the users responding to it, we learned that a large chunk of users actually wanted to just change their stay dates! And for doing that — they first cancel and then go through the entire booking journey again. Of course, we lost people in this transit.
We addressed this, by asking the reason before entering the cancellation flow. On capturing the intent for the date change, we gave the user an avenue to change the date on the interface. This helped us in bringing the cancellation % down.
IVR is a crucial business metric for marking post-booking success. Each IVR call is important as it adds to the cost. After the redesign, we recorded a drop in the number of calls on IVR, indicating that we were heading right on our path of making the post-booking details page a reliable self-serve.
Also, with our reorganisation of the booking confirmation page we served both types of major user personas (a) one with intent to do an action — easily find which action would help them do their job with a clear segmentation of actions and a seamless UX to execute it efficiently and (b) one’s who are anxious about the booking details had a reassuring design with a very glanceable way of presenting the information.
Post-booking was a massive redesign with a bag full of learnings. With a team effort, we were able to move mighty metrics & make a positive impact. And in this way, we completely changed a crucial piece for the better — for the best possible user experience.
