Traveling from one travel site to another

Originally I wanted this post to be about the redesign of the Skyscanner website. I use this travel site a lot and the recent redesign made it cleaner and easier to use than before. But the more I thought about why I like this site, the more I thought about other travel sites that I also use on a frequent basis. I realized that Skyscanner is very good at what I need it to do, but it does not fulfill all of my travel needs.

I primarily choose Skyscanner when I am flying within Europe and especially when my flying dates are flexible. Skyscanner checks Europe’s discount airlines and allows searches across an entire month. So, when I want to fly to Sweden sometime next month, it will tell me what days are the cheapest.

When I am flying longer routes across the pond with specific dates in mind, I try my luck at Kayak.com. This site does an excellent job in providing comprehensive results that can be filtered by criteria that are important to me, such as Airline, Nonstop flights, Layover Duration, and of course, Price. The email alerts are also very useful for booking last minute trips back home to New York.

Finally, I also visit ebookers.com in the rare event that I decide to book a pre-packaged tour or need a rental car.

Despite addressing different travel needs of mine, all three sites have a couple of things in common.

1. Navigation – Technologies such as AJAX blend into each site, enhancing the user experience rather than detracting from it, and therefore contributing to a very intuitive navigation.

2. Simplicity – Each site has distinct Call to Actions that drive the visitor farther into the site. The home pages are clean and simple, allowing visitors to get started with their searches right away.

3. Choice – The choices offered by each search engine are comprehensive, and more important, reliable.

I believe Skyscanner in particular holds tremendous potential. I find myself browsing the site for flight deals like I do on techbargains.com for extraordinary tech deals. It is a site I enjoy going to, and I find myself visiting when I do not necessarily have a specific destination in mind. The intuitive search makes it fun and easy to explore options for a weekend getaway.

This is where the potential lies. Skyscanner could cater to these browsing visitors by providing travel information on different destinations. Ryanair, for example, does this very well. This would be a great way of maintaining its competitive advantage since this type of flexible search is probably not too difficult to replicate. In fact, Kayak offers a similar search already. The main advantage is in addressing the needs of this visitor segment and proactively trying to keep them on the site. After all, flying to Lithuania for 6.45 EUR is only attractive when you know something about Lithuania!