In 2008, we were asked to participate in the rebuild of the booking engine, our mission was to design the interface and produce the HTML that would be used by EB2.
Our solution
Emakina already knew a lot about Brussels Airlines but we wanted to go further and get to know the full process of an online sale. What leads the customer to go on the web site and buy his tickets on the Brussels Airlines booking engine? To know about this we tested the full Brussels Airlines experience from the moment we see an ad on the street until the moment you come back from you flight and this helped us work on:
User experience. Emakina’s strategy focused on the end user’s perspective. As we knew the full cycle of a journey with Brussels Airlines, we could insert that knowledge in the reflexion of the how the new interface should be build.
New design. Emakina totally revamped the booking engine to make it match Brussels Airlines new design of course but moreover to translate in beautiful designs the usability reflexion.
User testing. What is best than the end user eye to show us where the interface is still not optimal? Emakina provided one week of user testing to evaluate the solution and refine the proposed solution.
High-end HTML. To support the analyses work and the killer design it is important that the HTML code produced meets high standard.
Benefits and results
The Brussels Airlines' booking engine is the heart of the online sales channel and has been evolving these past years:
- 50 % of new sales are online
- From 5 % to 30 % online sale in 5 years
The better user experience makes the booking easiest and makes the user less frightened to order and pay on-line, it also allows Brussels Airlines to offer more services with the possibility to buy insurances, lounge voucher, more luggage weight …
Thanks to Emakina's information architecture analyse and user testing, booking engine has taken a step further with one more increase of the sales and the addition of new functionalities.
Challenge
- Creating an efficient online sales channel for Brussels Airlines.
- Showing the brand positioning on the airlines market.
Execution
Brussels Airlines (formerly known as SN Brussels Airlines) website is targeted at passengers looking for a good price/quality offer, between low cost (RyanAir, EasyJet..) and top-level players. Consumers in this middle market are looking for affordable, competitive prices while still expecting services such as fast luggage delivery (price-sensitive AND time-sensitive passengers).
Business objectives:
- Increase the conversion rate of visitors to online purchasers by offering a customer-friendly environment that motivates and facilitates conversion through its design & usability (user interface & internet booking engine).
- Deliver targeted content according to the visitors needs (increase readership and the level of interest, decrease support inquiries to the call centre) and optimise content management (Content Management Framework).
- Seamless integration of (web-) applications bringing added-value to the visitor/customer.
- Effective measurement, tracking & analysis of the visitors/customers’ behaviour to detect and remove conversion hurdles (Web Analytics).
Brussels Airlines’ previous platform supported 11 languages in more than 50 different versions (Belgium/English, Belgium/French, Belgium/Flemish…). The English version is the standard and complete version. From this “master” version, copies were made and “blueprinted” for local websites. Some sections such as destinations, promotions, and prices have also been localised.
The Content Management System that has been selected is the Tridion Content Broker used to generate content from databases such as promotions and destinations.
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