Tracks travellers' eye movements for optimized booking experience.
STOCKHOLM – VIA Egencia, the business travel company of Expedia, Inc., announced the launch of its new, modern rail booking platform. The launch supports the VIA Egencia mission to transform business travel by integrating a consumer-style booking experience with full-service travel management with cutting-edge technology for business travellers.
A crucial part of the new interface for rail bookings was the use of eye-tracking research carried out with a group of volunteer business travellers. The resulting data was visualized in so-called “heat maps” that document which parts of the booking pages draw the most attention from users, and which parts were ignored. The results were used to optimize the website design, adapting the information and text according to the patterns registered during the study.
Michael Schuller, managing director at VIA Egencia Sweden, says: “Our aim is to always focus on the business travellers and arrangers and start from their needs when we create our products and services. It’s inspiring to be able to involve our travellers in our development research before finalizing the product, and we value this very much. It’s a win-win situation as we first see how users read the pages and then use this information to offer an intuitive, efficient and positive booking experience. We’ve obviously also integrated features for our Travel Managers, such as tools for travel policy management and a wide variety of reporting.”
Earlier in the year, VIA Egencia was awarded the prize for Best Travel Management Company at the Business Travel Awards in Stockholm.
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