iHotelier
Challenge
To increase the productivity of iHotelier's online reservations customer interface by streamlining a multi-step reservation process to boost conversion rates and increase return traffic for its clients.
Benefits
· Reduces entire reservation process down to one single screen
· Reduces the number of screens in the online reservation process from five to one. Other online reservation applications average five to ten screens.
· 75% of users choose OneScreen in favor of the HTML version
· Allows users to vary purchase parameters at will and immediately view results
· Reduces the time it takes to make a reservation from at least three minutes to under one
Project Details
Webvertising's flagship product, iHotelier, forms the centerpiece of online marketing efforts for many world-class hotels and resorts. Customers like The Broadmoor, a five-star, five-diamond resort in Colorado Springs, choose iHotelier to incorporate its integrated marketing technologies onto their Web sites and optimize online bookings and customer service.
iHotelier enables hotels to allocate inventory and rates to different channels, including the Web, and take reservations through their Web sites. iHotelier also comes complete with back-end administration tools for hotel reservation agents and staff. Capitalizing on its reputation for providing a cohesive, comprehensive approach to improving customer satisfaction for its hotel clients, Webvertising focused on improving the effectiveness of the reservation user interface as a priority for differentiating its product.
"Heads in Beds" is the bottom line for our clients in the hospitality industry," says Jim Whitney, Chief Technology Officer at Webvertising. "We wanted to improve our product's HTML user interface by incorporating dynamic content into an enhanced, graphical interface to make that a reality for our clients. Obviously, a key area for any hotel looking to improve the management of its online presence is to provide online guests with the most advanced, user-friendly features available, especially when it comes to making a reservation. Helping our clients improve sales and customer satisfaction was the driver behind our reservation system re-design."
Specifically, Webvertising wanted to replace its multi-screen, multi-step reservation process with a more streamlined procedure that would make it easier for a customer to complete the reservation process, even reducing the number of screens required to book a hotel reservation down to one. "The goal for any online service is expediency," says Whitney. "We wanted to improve the original process that confined potential hotel guests to a set series of steps, which may have to be repeated several times to reach a successful booking, or worse, might cause the potential hotel guest to bailout of the transaction entirely. The new interface allows the guest to see changes to data reflected instantly on the screen, with one simple submit at the end of the transaction. This reduces confusion and, ultimately, leads to increased bookings."
Developed in ColdFusion
iHotelier has evolved through three iterations since 1997. It's built around a reservation engine developed using ColdFusion, Macromedia's application server for building and deploying scalable Web applications. "ColdFusion offered us rapid development, open integration with our database and a powerful and accessible tag-based, server scripting language, resulting in a robust, yet flexible and easily maintained product," says Whitney. With a proven ColdFusion infrastructure in place, Webvertising looked to another Macromedia product to rebuild its HTML front end. It chose Macromedia Flash, and created a user interface that's unique in the hospitality industry.
Double Occupancy: Macromedia Flash and ColdFusion
Webvertising quickly discovered these two products make excellent roommates, boosting developer productivity and giving a free reign to designer creativity. Using ColdFusion to populate information dynamically into a Macromedia Flash interface allows developers to save time and money. And leveraging the sophisticated design capabilities inherent in the Macromedia Flash toolset to install a dynamic front end on a ColdFusion Web application creates a better user experience.
Built with ColdFusion and Macromedia Flash, Webvertising's OneScreen solution represents a new paradigm for the hotel industry, behaving like a business application for making online reservations while taking advantage of the deployment benefits of the Web.
"The OneScreen interface collapses the reservation process into a single step and a single screen, making the reservation process easier and faster," says Whitney. "The use of a single screen to graphically display calendar, inventory and reservation information allows customers to vary their purchasing parameters at will, and immediately view the results. Flash and ColdFusion working together enabled us to create a one-of-a-kind application for the hotel industry. OneScreen is a huge advantage over our competitors because none of them have anything that even approaches it. Hotels implementing OneScreen should see an impact on their bottom line."
Compared to other sites that average from five to ten steps, OneScreen improves conversion rates by basically eliminating the drop off statistics associated with a potentially frustrating multi-step process. HTML interface conversion rates-the percentage of people who actually complete an online reservation after starting the process-typically range from one percent to five percent.
The new interface also reduces the time it takes to make a reservation from three or four minutes to under a minute, eliminates the need for the user to start over for any reason, and reduces overall load times because users no longer have to wait while new data loads for different dates or room types selected.
Rapid Development, Improved Productivity
It took just one day to modify the application's ColdFusion infrastructure to quickly and easily load large amounts of data-dates, hotel rates, and inventory-into a Macromedia Flash interface. Whitney and his team modified the existing ColdFusion database query to load this data dynamically from ColdFusion into the Macromedia Flash user interface. Whitney noted that the flexibility and ease of use of ColdFusion's tag-based scripting language, especially tags like CFQUERY, CFLOOP and CFOUTPUT made this all very easy. As a result, serving up dynamic data for Macromedia Flash to read saves developer time in not having to code in HTML. ColdFusion's Custom Tags also allow Webvertising to easily adapt the OneScreen product to many different hotel clients.
"We are still a relatively small company and our marketing budget is limited, so when we had the idea for OneScreen, we wanted to make sure we were the first to deliver," says Whitney. "We didn't have a lot of time to bring this product to market, and even though I had never worked with Macromedia Flash, tools like Flash arrays made handling the data more convenient, and the ability to dynamically duplicate MovieClips saved a lot of time."
Building Better User Interfaces
Together ColdFusion and Macromedia Flash allowed Webvertising to make OneScreen completely dynamic. Using the loadVariables command, Whitney altered the initial query to the database to load rate and inventory data into Macromedia Flash. Then he leveraged the powerful layout capabilities of Macromedia Flash to create a calendar that provides a visual setting for the reservation process that's intuitive and user-friendly.
"Compared to HTML sites, where users have to deal with as many as three pull-down menus just for the dates, OneScreen's calendar saves a lot of time and frustration," says Whitney.
OneScreen also liberates the guest from a pre-defined series of steps and repetitive loops in the event of a room's unavailability. In the previous version, a user would first have to enter arrival and departure dates and wait for a query to the database to bring up the available rooms. If none were found, he/she would get a message saying, "Sorry, try again," and he would have to start again with a new set of dates, or a new kind of room, and wait for another response.
With OneScreen the user can start anywhere on the screen, completing the required tasks in any order. Selecting dates on the calendar will always block out unavailable room types, and selecting a room type will always block out days on the calendar when that room is unavailable. Looking at OneScreen's calendar, it's easy to see at single glance where you stand.
"Using Macromedia Flash Movie Clips and Buttons allowed us to build the calendar dynamically," says Whitney. "Movie clips have their own time line and allow you to store different state material about each item, like a date being selected or unselected, or a room type being available or unavailable. We could then switch between those states depending on whether a room was available or unavailable, based on what Macromedia Flash finds about each item from the database."
And with the initial data load into Macromedia Flash the user doesn't have to wait for queries to the database, which can be time-saving if he/she is limping through an almost fully-booked hotel with many different room types. "OneScreen reduces the number of queries to the database down to two; the initial load and the final hit for a room confirmation number at the end," says Whitney.
In the first two months since going live, Webvertising reports that 75 percent of users are choosing OneScreen in favor of the HTML version. At the Broadmoor, online reservations traffic is way up. Since September 2nd, OneScreen has been loaded 8650 times, approximately 4325 times per month. To compare, since January 2001, the HTML reservations process was started 25,000 times, only 3125 times per month.
Says Whitney, "Broadmoor's experience with OneScreen plays out our expectations for the product to provide an intuitive, simple way to make reservations online. Macromedia Flash is an integral component of that experience, and enabled us to put a one-of-a-kind product on the market."
Site Summary
Webvertising, Inc.
3100 Richmond Avenue, Suite 200
Houston, Texas 77098
Macromedia Products:
ColdFusion Server 4.5, Enterprise Edition; ColdFusion Studio 4.5; Macromedia Flash
Hardware:
2 Dell development Servers
2 Dell test/production Servers
Operating System:
Server: Windows NT 4.0
Macromedia Flash development: MacOS 9.0
ColdFusion development: Windows NT
Database:
Microsoft SQL Server 7.0
Internet Connection:
Multiple T3 connections from hosting provider
Development Team:
1 developer and 1 designer
Industry:
Professional Services
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