The UK is still on tenterhooks, awaiting for what seems like the forever changing Covid rules landscape when it comes to travelling abroad. Due to this, many Brits are waiting out the booking of their summer holidays, making sure they can definitely go where they want to go, without ten tons of procedures and paperwork to get there! This unrest is creating a last minute holiday booking surge, either to those further afield destinations, or when abroad is seeming like too much work, a staycation here in the UK.
It’s not just the changing Covid rules increasing the staycation bookings, some people just aren’t ready to travel abroad amidst the emerging Covid variants, with June this year seeing a 75% increase in UK holiday bookings!
The real question is, whether you’re selling holidays at home or away, is your travel site ready and able to cope with this heavy traffic?
We’re often talking about the customer experience when visiting a site, and it’s known that booking a holiday has one of the longest online customer journeys out there.
From perusal of hundreds of destinations, selection of hotels, flights, trains, cars, baggage and insurances, to finally making a payment and booking that all important vacation. For this reason, customers who experience glitches, or find they’re unable to access part (or all) of a site, can become incredibly frustrated, especially if it all goes wrong just as they get to that payment page! Making them leave your site disgruntled and vowing to never to return again and looking for their holiday elsewhere. In a time where last minute holiday booking is going to be the trend, your site having issues or failing to load due to the large numbers accessing the site, isn’t a viable option.
So how can you avoid the financial and reputational crisis that can occur if (or when) these issues arise? Performance monitoring and load testing!
By testing the performance of your site, you can see what a customer sees, experience issues before they’re customer issues and rectify loading issues due to high volumes. By seeing how and when the site becomes overloaded, you are given the chance to put in place ways to prevent this happening and avoid the customer frustration and abandonment.
If you need help with performance monitoring and load testing your site to ensure it can cope with the last minute holiday booking surge, get in touch with us here at thinkTRIBE, we’d be happy to help keep your customers smiling and booking their vacations with you.