Well last week AlphaRooms launched the new website, its been in production for a while so it was a bit of a milestone to finally get it live. Im basically just going to go through some of the main changes, their effects so far and the ongoing work that we’ve undertaken – its all happening down at Alpha HQ!
Well the first major change is the look and feel of the site, its basically just been brought up to date and added in a bit more colour. Hopefully it should be a bit more friendly now. This shouldn’t affect sales much at all as its purely cosmetic.
Second we have the cross sell, this is where things get a bit good for affiliates. As you go through the booking process and confirm your accommodation theres now a very simple cross sell of both insurance and airport transfers where a user can simply tick a checkbox to add in the extra. We’ve already seen this making an effect with many affiliates seeing sales for £500 followed very quickly by a £50 sale and then a £12 sale – no this isn’t a tracking error or a cheap hotel for one night it’s the accommodation, transfer and insurance tracking as separate sales. Hopefully this should see the total overall booking value increase with no extra work from affiliates!
Next the search as you wait we now count the number of hotels we’ve found as they return results to us, as well as being faster. So as you sit and wait you have an idea of the number of results your going to see, but the best bit is the filtering on the results page you can now filter very easily by board basis, star rating, cheapest, our recommended hotels and much more very very easily.
Better navigation, everything links to everything. From pretty much all the pages you can get to rich guide content, weather forecasts and seasonal data, hotel listings, reviews and a hell of a lot more! Search forms reside on most pages so wherever you end up theres always a call to action.
Alfie suggests, if you don’t know where you want to go we have a series of questions such as month, your desired temperature, whos going (family, couple, friends etc) that narrow down some of our top destinations to give you an idea of whats available and at what cost – great for the user who doesn’t know what they want.
Local language sites, we now have sites in French, German and Spanish – Alpha goes pan European! Fantastic!
Ongoing – we’re committed to making this site the best accommodation only site out there! We’re going to work as hard as we can to make the most out of any traffic coming into the site and over the coming months anyone sending a volume of traffic should slowly start to see the conversion creep up.
2007 is going to be a good year for AlphaRooms.com and all our affiliates!
a more firendly site should equaly more sales…as people will find it easier to use and not leave the site when they shouldnt!…