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Loosschilder, Van der Rest, Schwartz and Cordella present:

Sorting and Filtering Behavior on Online Booking Sites

Implications for hotel revenue management

Starring:

CharlotteInteraction designer

AstridBusiness traveler

OscarRevenue manager GerART

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Meet

Astrid

Princess and Business Traveler

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We also know Astrid as the former queen of a small yet interesting multilingual country north of Paris.

Princess Queen Realm

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When she was young she was not just a princess but she was also an ambitious young lady who desired to travel the world.

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However Because Astrid was a princess, she hardly got a chance to escape from under the suffocating wings of her security detail.

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The Princess was specifically engaged with animal rights. Wherever she could and her position allowed her, she would engage in activities to defend animals; endangered and common species alike.

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So one day, she managed to get away. Because of her voluntary work for an animal rights defense fund she was invited to be the keynote speaker at a conference in beautiful Istanbul.

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However, because Astrid was a princess, she was not at all used to booking trips. She had staff doing that for her.

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Not this time. She was invested in booking the trip herself, and in doing so all alone. So Astrid visited a booking site.

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Astrid panicked from the choices of hotels and their prices and specifications. It was overwhelming. How could she choose a hotel if she had never done it or had never been in Istanbul?

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How could she know about the meaning of ratings if her servants usually made the bed and did other chores in her household? What did quality of service, staff or facilities mean to her? She lived in a castle with her own facilities and staff. If she did not like them she would simply fire them.

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So Astrid went by the structure of the website page of search results and she choose the top option.

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A few days later she went on her business trip to Istanbul.She was so excited!

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The hotel room was bad. It was clear to Astrid that the hotel chain had invested in something else than the room.

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So, she was not satisfied at all, but she learned a lot from this trip. She now understood the relevance of ratings and she vowed that she would pay more attention to the hotels on the website next time, instead of going by the order of entries on the website.

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Meet

OscarRevenue manager

at the booking site

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The website operations is under the authority of Oscar; revenue manager for the booking site.Oscar’s task is to maximize proceedings and profit; his main tool is the commissioning fee that the booking site charges for bookings. The fee structure is such that the site charges most for the top placements, and progressively less for the lower placements.

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That’s because Oscar knows that beyond a certain position, the site loses virtually all its traction. The actual position varies by the source, but usually it says that after position 5 and page 1 it is done. Oscar does not mind; he is primarily interested in the performance of the top positions and squeezes the advertisers in those positions relentlessly.

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This strategy works well for Oscar. He is a cherished revenue manager, meeting and overshooting his targets year after year, being a true asset to the booking site.

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Meet

Charlotte

Interface Designer

at the booking site

One day, Charlotte joined the booking site team. Charlotte was an interaction designer by training.

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She was happy to work at the booking site. That’s because it is her ambition to share her passion of travelling with others.

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When Charlotte looked at the booking site is struck her that the UI design was bare. It hardly included any element that would facilitate the visitor’s search. No functions at all that would structure the visitor’s choice any differently from the original order on the search results page.

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So Charlotte suggested some minimal and simple UI design changes to the booking site: sort and filter functions to start with.

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With the Sort function, visitors could reorder the entries on the result page according to a criterion that was relevant to them, e.g., room prices or ratings of the quality of staff, service, or facilities. Thereby they could put constraints for the aspects that they would accept and the set of acceptable solutions.

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With the filter function, visitors could set top and bottom limits to search criteria, such as the maximum price they would want to pay or the minimum hotel rating they would accept.

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Charlotte took her UI design suggestions to Oscar and explained her intentions. She wanted to help visitors navigate and search more easily through the options, and by that, ensure that they ended up with a “better” choice – a choice that would be more satisfying and made sure that they came back.

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Oscar scolded at her because he saw it as a disruption of his business model: driving choices to the top positions, and by that, charge high commission fees for those positions.

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Oscar and Charlotte served different interests; Charlotte was looking for visitor satisfaction and recurring sales in the long run; and Oscar for instant revenue maximization. To demonstrate that these interests are actually not in conflict and because in the end, both Charlotte and Oscar are business professionals and not street fighters, they decided to do an experiment.

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They put up both versions of the booking site in an experiment to see which version performed best.

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Back to

Astrid

Princess and

Business Traveler

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Astrid had learned from her trip to Istanbul not to be satisfied with the first entry on the search results page. So when a next trip to Istanbul for the animal rights fund came up, she decided to do it different.

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After typing in the details of her trip; the start and return date and the destination, the booking site offered her a selection of 50 results across various scrollable pages. It was a challenge. But different from last time, Astrid was happy to learn that the search engine also had changed. It now also offered the opportunity to sort and filter the results.

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Call to action

Hotel Chain, Type & Style

Distance to city center

Placement of hotel on the page

At the bottom of the page there was a none option, allowing the

respondent not to choose any of the 50 rooms

The gallery page contained 50 hotel rooms and their specifications. The respondent had

to browse down to get to lower-positioned rooms.

Filter functions on price and ratings

Sort functions on price and rating Review Score on

cleanliness, staff and facilities; result in a mean

score and a label

Including room price per night

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So Astrid filtered the results first by setting a maximum price – which was still high because in the end, she was still a spoiled little Princess.

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She also set a minimum rating, because why would she keep up with conditions that she would not accept at home in her palace?

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Now that the choice set was more manageable, Astrid could pay more attention to hotels themselves: choosing a hotel close to the city center.

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As well as choosing the right chain and brand of hotel that would meet her requirements.

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Which was not easy. Would she choose for boutique or for luxury?

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Astrid took the trip and her hotel was great. In fact, when she did her review on Tripadvisor she mentioned how she had found the hotel and that it was a true improvement over last time.

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Back to Charlotte and Oscar and their experiment

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The two versions of the website and their experiment had been up for a couple of weeks. Oscar and Charlotte met to see the effect on visitor booking behavior. Both collected ammunition to convince the other of their correctness.

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Point for Charlotte: the use of the functions by a portion of the visitors resulted in a better distribution of choices. So the real estate value of the site went up because now not only the top positions performed well but all positions did. Although the effect only applied to those using the functions, overall value was still better because many of visitors used the functions.

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Point for Oscar: not everybody used the sort and filter functions, so Charlotte may have done a bad UI design job. That’s of course a cheap punch, but that’s what you can expect of a business goon. Those who did not use the functions defaulted even more strongly to the top positions. So if Charlotte designed a better user interface, results would be more evenly distributed.

% of visitors using the function

Users could sort on price

or rating

Users could sort on price

or rating

Users could sort on price

or rating

Users could filter on price and

rating

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Point for Charlotte: task satisfaction was higher after the introduction of the functions and the consistency of choices went up. It means that the longer-term value of the site may have gone up because of the likelihood of repeat business due to happier visitors.

Users who

have the filter

and sort

filters

available are

more

satisfied.

Users who

use the sort

filter on

rating are the

most more

satisfied.

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Point for Oscar: those who did use the filter option, used nothing more often, which represents lost business. We see this inclination to revert to the absence of a choice in other metrics too.

… than those who did not have or use the filter.

Users using the filter, more often choose nothing …

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In addition, those who did use the functions chose rooms at lower room prices. There goes Oscar’s commission. Charlotte seems to have ruined Oscar’s proceedings from the commission fee by driving the choice for cheaper rooms.

… than those who did not have or use the filter.

Users using sort and filter functions chose cheaper rooms …

The average prices of rooms chosen

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Famous last words

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So the jury is still out. The short term results are actually negative because there are fewer visitors who choose a room and those who do and use a sort and filter function, choose a cheaper room. So it is a leap of faith if we should advise to keep using the sort and filter function, or any other UI design measure to steer consumer choices away from the top positions, because it may have adverse effects.

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This round, we declare Oscar the winner from a proceedings point of view.

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Thank you!

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gerard.loosschilder@gmail.com gerardloosschilder.com+31 6 2266 5218 (GWT+1) @Gloosschilder