The rapid changes in the travel market have forced brands to differentiate themselves even more. The paradigm shift to digital and an ever-growing demand for personalization has presented opportunities for travel companies to improve the way they serve customers. Travel brands are able to create more personalized experiences by leveraging first-party data to show customers only the most relevant messages rather than showing customers all they have to offer, including app downloads, trip insurance, co-branded credit cards, customer feedback surveys, car rental offers, and more. These messages can quickly create clutter, leading to a poor experience that overwhelms your customers. This phenomenon — that an abundance of options causes anxiety rather than happiness despite people thinking the reverse — is known as the paradox of choice.

Understanding the Paradox of Choice: Why Too Many Options Create Clutter

Before examining how to improve your online booking flow, let’s dig into the psychology behind the paradox of choice and how many of us unknowingly experience this regularly in everyday life.

Anyone who subscribes to a streaming service such as Netflix can relate to scrolling through options for ages before finding something to watch. Are you in the mood for a happy-ending romance or an action-packed drama? Movie or sitcom? Before you know it, an hour has gone by and you’re still wandering through the Netflix catalog. By now, you’re overwhelmed and might just decide to go to bed instead. Or, you make a seemingly random selection out of frustration but still feel unsatisfied. To an extent, choice is good. After all, a Netflix library with only two choices would hardly be successful. However, too much choice leads to discontentment.

The Challenge of Clutter in Today’s Travel Industry

Over the last few decades, the travel industry has substituted one form of travel booking chaos for another. As air travel started to become more widely accessible, airline reservations were made through agents who would use a physical board to track bookings. At one point, as the quantity of flights grew, agents needed binoculars to see the options available! Unsurprisingly, the margin of error was high. Talk about a poor customer experience.

Today, technology has made it much easier to select and book a flight. However, technology presents its own challenges. Travel companies, enabled by technology, have introduced a different kind of chaos into the booking process by showing an overwhelming amount of ancillary offerings like loyalty sign-ups, trip insurance, car rentals, and more. With so much space in digital, it’s tempting for travel companies to crowd their booking flows with upsells, especially on the confirmation page.

The confirmation page provides travel companies an untapped opportunity to engage customers, but only if approached with careful consideration. Research shows that consumers are at their happiest on the confirmation page and they’re more likely to engage with related offers at this stage.*

Companies often use the confirmation page in one of three ways: they show nothing (which is a missed opportunity), they show everything (which overwhelms users), or they show three static options that aren’t relevant to the particular customer (which is a poor customer experience).

Tidying Up Your Booking Flow

From the moment they begin to book their trip to the minute they return home, customers want a frictionless experience. Yet, all too often, they’re bombarded with irrelevant messages when booking their trip. To help address this challenge, we’ve identified three ways travel and hospitality companies can improve their online booking flow.

Learn more here.

*45 percent of customers rank the confirmation page as the place when they’re happiest shopping online vs. 38 percent when adding items to the cart, 10 percent when entering payment information, and 7 percent when sharing purchase news with friends. Data is from a survey conducted by Rokt in August 2022 of 3,212 consumers from the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Japan.