The assumption from Marketing was that the website was not converting due to poor design. The expectations was that we would immediately begin redesigning the site. However - suspecting a deeper cause - we did something different instead.
Working closely with our UX Research team, we reached out to hundreds of Rooms visitors to learn more about their experience using the Ryanair Rooms website. We used Hotjar to monitor customer satisfaction during their visit, and used bespoke questionnaires to gather more detailed quantitative data. A shortlist of about 30 customers were interviewed by Skype and asked to share their experiences and provide qualitative data.
After several days of interviews and analysis, we collated our findings and presented the data.
Contrary to the assumptions of our Marketing team, the overall design of the site did not account for the poor performance of the platform. Instead, our users provided a list of the anxieties which were inhibiting their use of the site.
Their anxieties were:
Our hypothesis was that addressing each of these anxieties would improve customer satisfaction, and increase conversion figures.
From this point on, our goal was to inject "Trust and Reassurance" messaging at every key decision point throughout the site and to anticipate the anxieties of our visitors.
When analysing the conversion funnel, we noticed some very strange behaviour. Users were clicking through to the end of the journey, and then returning to the search results page without booking. Session recordings confirmed this.
Interviews revealed users were clicking in search of any 'sneaky' fees or cancellation clauses which were going to be applied at the end of the booking.
To address this, we moved a 'price breakdown' module to a page early in the flow, and added colour coded 'FREE means FREE' messaging to our cancellation details.
Ryanair customers have grown so accustomed to the business's "no frills" mentality, that they assumed all rooms on the site were poor quality hotels located near airports.
We redesigned our accomodation cards to show several large images on a rotating carousel. The images were labelled with the logo of our provider (e.g Hotels.com) and each hotel was clearly labelled with "distance from city centre".
While the original Ryanair Rooms website displayed a customer rating and a detailed description for every hotel, our customers admitted that they assumed Ryanair was manipulating this information to upsell cheaper hotel chains to Ryanair customers.
We identified several key touchpoints - including loading screens and transitions - to reinforce the message that our hotel reviews were provided by an independent, third party provider. In addition, all hotel listings clearly displayed the logo of our review partner beside their hotel rating, and provided details of how many reviews had been left for each hotel.
On the portal's home page, we created a section where real customers could leave reviews for their favourite hotels, alongside their name and country.
Throughout Ryanair's Marketing team, the concept of 'Flight Credit' was considered a key selling point for Ryanair Rooms.
However, our customer questionnaires and interviews revealed that many of our customers were confused by the concept, or were unsure how they could claim and redeem their Flight Credit.
We revised the messaging throughout the standard user flow to reinforce the value proposition of Flight Credit and to ensure that every key touch point provided users with access to detailed instructions on how the could claim and redeem their Flight Credit.
Over the space of a few weeks, we continued to make gradual changes to the 'Trust and Assurance' messaging and design of the Ryanair Rooms platform. Help sections and FAQs were added to critical payment pages, and detailed price breakdowns and Cancellation Advisory messages were made prominent on search results and hotel detail pages.
This incremental and iterative approach allowed us to monitor changes in real time. Immediately, we observed changes in user behaviour and improvement in conversion.
