Macbook Pro

STAY CURIOUS

EXPEDIA

Iterating on our assumptions is as important as iterating on our products.

THIS IS A STORY ABOUT HELPING A TEAM AT EXPEDIA NOT GIVE UP AND TAKE STEPS FOWARD WITH CURIOSITY

Expedia has been a significant player in the travel market for 20 years, providing a platform for travelers to book trips. However, with traveler behavior and expectations rapidly changing, we wondered if those assumptions were still valid. Therefore, this was an excellent opportunity to challenge the status quo and reevaluate our approach.

Our journey to transform Expedia from a mere online booking agent to a comprehensive online travel shopping platform was a collective effort. When we introduced a cart, a standard e-commerce pattern, into our shopping funnel, I led my team to adopt an open-minded approach and question traditional norms, highlighting the importance of each team member's contribution in this shift.

Problems

User Roles

Early Explorations

Learnings

Moving forward while facing uncertainty

Traveler Insights

A Collaborative Approach

Refining Ideas & Testing our Assumptions

Expedia’s differentiation within the travel space is its ability to negotiate flights, hotels, and cars as a discounted rate for travelers.

INCREASE

INCREASE

PACKAGES

First launch wasn’t performing to original estimates

Team felt that data let them down, and they were quick to want to stop the experiment.

GIVE UP

GIVE UP

TEAM WANTED TO

SAVE MONEY

SAVE MONEY

When it comes to why people visit Expedia, searching for deals is arguably the top reason. Research consistently shows that travelers value this feature highly, and they must trust the savings are genuine.

HELP TRAVELERS

Traveler

Anyone using Expedia, or its affiliates, to browse and book travel related goods and services

Supplier

The companies that supply flights, hotels, cars, and travel experiences able to be purchased on Expedia.

Marketplace

The policies, procedures, and services required to keep the balance between the traveler and the supplier.

The first version of the cart focused on the most popular products sold together, and could not support anything else placed in the cart other than one flight and one hotel.

FLIGHT + HOTEL

1

Unrestricted
Functionality

People expect to have easy and constant access to their cart, which should be seamlessly integrated with all the website's features.

Traveler behavior didn’t map to corporate silos

Travelers do not always follow a linear purchasing process.

Travelers need more time to consider details

One of the major reasons travelers contact our Support Team is due to the overwhelming amount of information they have to keep track of.

The team's original direction was based on data, but they missed the bigger picture. Long-held beliefs on the current user experience of Expedia drove their focus on cost savings and Hotel+Flight options. When the experiment wasn’t succeeding, the team was stuck, and willing to walk away.


To find a different approach, we needed to analyze broader shopping behavior to understand why travelers behaved the way they did on the site.

Broader Data We Collected

  1. Offline: When shopping in physical stores, people's behavior provides valuable insights into their decision-making process, including product comparison and deal-seeking.

  2. Online: After examining typical e-commerce patterns, we also wanted to explore all the tools and processes people use to shop online.

  3. Internal: We also wanted to take advantage of our research team's great work.

  4. Third-party: Finally, we looked at papers and articles published by other reputable research institutions on shopping behavior.

Curation

Time on the site is a series of visits spent filtering down decisions over a 30-45 day window.

Reconfirmation

The amount of details a traveler has to consume and decide on is too overwhelming. This forces large bounce rates between key pages and is the number one call center topic.

Experience First

Travelers base how they shop for a trip with an experience in mind first,
not a product.

Personalize
Recommendations

Products and features
have to adapt and learn in proportion to effort spent on the site.

Who was involved

  • Engineering

  • Product

  • Design Leads

  • Research

We collaborated with other teams and functions to move past the first iteration. I prioritized a safe environment and led the team to build on the existing ideas and add the supporting Shopping Behavior suggested by our data.

Share
Data

Develop
Ideas

Test

2

2

4

1

1

3

1

4

Testing showed that when we organized a traveler's selections as a trip, it was well received - 98% of participants found the new system easy to use and informative.

We then conducted further experiments to differentiate between shopping and booking behavior of travelers using the site.

These experiment confirmed that Travelers do in fact use Expedia as a shopping experience.

Hotel prices change often. We ran an experiment to remind them that their selection was not static. However, this proved more confusing than helpful.

"Add to Cart" had a 15% higher conversion rate than clicking on "Select Hotel".

Details down to whether or not the standard e-commerce check-out language should be used was tested. It turns out, Travelers preferred Trips over Cart.

HOME

HOTEL

DETAILS

FLIGHT

SEARCH

RESULTS

FLIGHT

DETAILS

HOTEL

SEARCH

HOTEL

SEARCH

RESULTS

BUSINESS IMPACT

Allowing Expedia to train their AI models more accurately and efficiently than previously able

SIGNALS

SIGNALS

CLEAR INTENT

The more we learned, the more we wanted to share those learnings. Eventually this experiment led to Expedia adopting Trips as its primary way to help travelers shop.

SHOPPING

SHOPPING

SHIFTING TOWARDS

45M

45M

PROJECTED EARNINGS

%

30

30

DECREASED CALL CENTER VOLUME

3