Increasing P&O Cruises Fly-Cruise conversion rate by over 30%
The Theory
A fly-cruise is a delight for holiday makers, but a complex product for P&O Cruises - one which the team knew there was an opportunity to improve the performance of. Streamlining the customer journey was essential to increasing online bookings for this sort of trip. But to do this, P&O first needed to understand what was preventing them from booking a fly-cruise holiday with confidence. That’s why they turned to us, leaning on our strong partnership, brand knowledge and user experience expertise to increase their online fly-cruise conversion rate.
Experimentation
It all started with us understanding how P&O’s website visitors are behaving today - gathering data from stakeholders across the organisation, workshopping what the existing fly-cruise online journey looks like, and using these insights to create a customer journey map. The map allowed us to see the product through the eyes of the user, gaining an insight into their motivations and needs as well as friction points in the current online experience.
But we didn’t stop there, we conducted four usability tests to understand user behaviour even deeper. Delving into specific tasks that people complete as part of the fly-cruise booking process and identifying behavioural themes within them. This allowed us to spot pain points in the website journey, highlighted areas where the user experience could be improved, and helped us to understand the technical restraints within the space.
We figured out where in the journey users were experiencing frustration, then put forward a range of experiments in order to reduce the friction and help customers book their dream holiday with ease.
Solution
As always, we balanced in-depth user research with fast, iterative testing. Approaching the project in a way which meant P&O could prove the impact of each change. And encouraging close collaboration between different teams to ensure everyone involved understood the user journey from start to finish.
From our moderated study of the existing fly-cruise journey, we discovered that seeing flight information gives people the brand confidence they need to complete their booking. However, current product pages lacked flight details and most users weren’t scrolling to see these details at the summary stage.
We broke our research findings down into four themes and translated them into design sprints, allowing us to implement change as efficiently as possible. In a two week sprint we could identify 5-6 issues customers were experiencing and put forward 7-8 solutions ready to be tested. This included bringing flight information further up the journey, simplifying the summary page, introducing fly-cruise products earlier to help people understand the offer, and moving airport options higher up the funnel. This increased knowledge around fly-cruises, enabling customers to make informed holiday decisions.
Results
P&O originally set out to improve their online fly-cruise conversion rate by 30%, but in the first three sprints alone we increased it by over 40%. Our experiments also promoted a positive behaviour change, maximising the time spent on pages and encouraging users to look at fewer products before making a purchase, reflecting the fact that they now get the information they needed sooner.
It isn’t just the conversion rate that’s improved though, the order quality has too - jumping by £176. As we continue to conduct experiments, monitor the data and roll out our learnings, we’re already excited to see the future results. Continuing to help P&O to supercharge their testing, understand their data and hit their bottomline with great results, faster than ever.
The Results
revenue generated by the experimentation
bookings generated by the experimentation
increase in conversion
