Increasing new hotel bookings
Overview
Role
Led this project as a Sr. Strategy Manager, leading ideation of ways to address the problem, program managing, and presenting to leadership (SVP). Because there was no designer for this project, I produced designs for testing
Led a cross-functional team that included 2 product managers along with leads from analytics, legal, product marketing, comms, and engineering
Timeline
Q1 - Q2 2022 (5 months)
PROBLEM STATEMENT
Expedia continues to acquire new hotel properties but many are not receiving any bookings due to competition with existing properties and travelers’ lack of trust in booking a hotel property without any reviews. This, in turn, leads to hotel properties leaving the site or becoming “zombie listings” (live but never receive bookings) and creates a growing segment of properties that do not generate any revenue for Expedia
DESIGN PROCESS
SOLUTION
New properties will be merchandised in a way that increases their chance of getting a booking. The redesign gives more exposure to travelers while searching without impacting existing properties, and the solution incorporates new badging and attributes that increase a traveler’s trust to book.
Before
After
Problem
BUSINESS PROBLEM
New hotel properties have a hard time getting a first booking on Expedia. Travelers have a lack of trust in booking a new property, as they do not have enough assurance in their search that it will be a quality stay. This, in turn, presents a major obstacle for new properties to get a booking. This first booking is key, as it leads to review and provides a signal to future travelers on whether or not to book. Therefore, it is absolutely essential for new properties to get a first booking in order to see healthy booking production on the site. If not, properties that Expedia acquires will end up being zombie listings (live on the site but no bookings) or leave the site.
Current Experience in Search
USER GOAL
We want to increase the chances of getting a first booking for our partners who list new properties on Expedia and also prevent partners from getting frustrated with no bookings and end up de-listing their properties from the site.
BUSINESS GOAL
The primary goal is to increase the number of properties with first bookings, knowing that this will lead to an increase in future lifetime bookings and revenue for Expedia. An additional goal would be to steal calendar share of new properties from Expedia’s main competitor, Booking.com.
Research
PARTNER INSIGHTS
We unfortunately did not have formal Research resources who could conduct partner research. Despite this, I still went to our market management teams for insights, as they directly manage relationships with Expedia’s hotel partners and regularly speak with them about how to perform successfully on the platform. They gave some key insights, including:
Generally, partners feel like new properties have an extremely hard time getting a booking as they are competing against existing properties that have bookings and reviews
Competitors are aggressive with new properties - Booking.com exposes 90%+ of new properties on first page
QUANTITATIVE ANALYSIS & SIZING
To understand this problem, we worked with our analytics team to quantify the nature of the problem. We found that:
22% of new properties are no longer live by the end of the first year
⅓ of new properties get <10 bookings in the first year
New properties with 0 bookings typically churn at 37% whereas new properties with 10 bookings churn at 7%
Ideation
PROBLEMS TO SOLVE
Based on the analytics and insights from the research phase, we first brainstormed why new properties were not getting enough bookings, and we hypothesized that a traveler was not likely to book a new property for a few reasons:
The traveler does not have confidence in booking a new property because there are no reviews
The traveler does not even see the property when they are searching
Afterwards, I came up with this problem statement to address these reasons and narrow our focus:
How might we expose new properties better so that a traveler is more likely to book?
IDEATING WAYS TO EXPOSE PROPERTIES
There were two areas that we ideated through when thinking of how to expose new properties better. The first area was working with the Sort Team to ideate how we could modify Expedia’s sort algorithm to increase visibility and demand towards new properties. It’s important to note that these ideas would not materialize in a front-end design but are still crucial in exposing new properties better to a traveler. The second area, however, was working with the Search and Display team to think through new attributes that we can implement in the search experience to create more confidence in booking a new property.
Design
SEARCH RANKING
When coming up with the designs, we knew that placement of a new property in the search ranking was going to be crucial in getting travelers to see the property. However, simply putting new properties at the top of sort could impact overall traveler conversion, as quality existing properties that are likely to get a booking would get less exposure. So, we had to come up with a way of giving new properties without impacting overall traveler conversion. We landed on coming up with a separate carousel of new properties that would not interfere with normal search ranking. The second solution was to give new properties a temporary boost in search ranking based on property quality score that we devised, taking into account content completeness, pricing, reviews, and Expedia products adoption. This would also give travelers exposure to new properties as they browse all properties in a given market.
MERCHANDISING
Lastly, we came up with ways to merchandise properties better to instill more confidence to a traveler. Reviews are the biggest signal for a traveler to feel confident, but because a new property will not have reviews, we decided to use reviews from Booking.com, as new properties are more aggressively sorted there and may have received a booking already. In the future, we could also expand this to other competitors as well. We also wanted included a “New to Expedia” badge to establish more context with a traveler on why there were competitor reviews (or no reviews at all).
Search Page I: Before
Search Page I: After
Search Page II: Before
Search Page II: After
TESTING
I transitioned off the project before we could do testing on these designs. However, I helped craft the plan to test these different solutions. Because the overall design consists of multiple changes, we made sure to prioritize a test for each incremental change, so that we could quantify each incremental change and know which enhancement yields the biggest impact. For each test, we would run A/B tests and measure overall bookings for new properties while monitoring overall booking conversion for sort. We also wanted to measure metrics, such as overall searches and page visits for new properties. This would help us understand if exposure was working but things like quality were impacting a traveler’s desire to book.
Conclusion
If I had gotten to continue working on this project, I would work closely with our product teams to run iterative tests of these different designs. I also would like to explore how we improve the quality of new properties, as well. This project was very focused on how we expose new properties better, but there is still a dependency that the new property we expose is of good quality. Therefore, I would also want to think through the onboarding experience as well for properties and implementing treatments in the product that coach new properties on how to improve areas like content or pricing. These types of treatments combined with the designs above would holistically improve a new property’s chance of receiving a booking.