YAHOO! TRAVEL RESEARCH

Challenge

Yahoo! Travel consisted mostly of city destination pages with a faretracker to find flight prices. What else could we do to better serve travelers?

Solution

We did ethnographic research to identify what triggered people to start researching a potential trip. (They were 1) Low flight cost 2) Knowing the kind of experience they wanted.)

Outcome

We incorporated latest lowest fares in certain Yahoo! search results to drive engagement and created hubs for types of trips like "romantic getaway" etc.

How do people approach travel?

I was part of a team that did ethnographic deep dives with people who were about to plan a trip. We discovered that there were a handful of common trip types.

And that a possible trip went from an idea to "let me actually explore what this could be" based on several triggers.

A main one was seeing a low flight price to somewhere they wanted to go. Another one was when they decided on what experience they wanted to have (relax on the beach or romantic getaway or golf vacation etc). I created this infographic to summarize our findings for the company.

Interesting findings

Seeing low airfare to somewhere they wanted to go was a bigger trigger than saving money on hotel stays, even though lodging usually takes up way more of a trip budget.
Hubs of trip types, like golf vacation, made it easier for people to compare different destinations and that led to longer sessions on the site.
Creating vacation type hubs also meant Yahoo! could sell advertising packages at a higher premium for those hubs.

I left Yahoo! before the hubs were launched so I didn't get much specific data on how the new hubs did overall.

Portfolio