KAYAK is a metasearch engine for travel services that strives to help its customers experience the best travel expedite by finding various travel accommodations. Currently, KAYAK’s website allows a user to create and customize a trip as a solo traveler. Customizing this trip entails a user having the ability to choose a location and save various accommodations for that trip.
For this project, KAYAK desired our team to create and implement a group travel feature on its platform. Our team created goals to understand our user group and how they travel in groups. I also aimed to understand the competitive landscape around KAYAK, exploring how other companies have incorporated group travel into their operations.
The findings reveal that users' primary priorities when traveling include budgets, locations, and dates. The design solution enables multiple users to collaborate effectively on these categories, delivering user-friendly designs that streamline communication and decision-making throughout the group travel planning process.
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KAYAK is a travel metasearch engine that helps users find and compare prices for flights, hotels, rental cars, and vacation packages. It aggregates information from various travel websites to provide users with a comprehensive overview of available options and prices, allowing them to make informed travel decisions.
Currently, KAYAK’s website allows a user to create and customize a trip as a solo traveler. Customizing this trip entails a user having the ability to choose a location and save various accommodations for that trip such as hotels, and rental cars.
The goal for this project is to create new features that implement group travel for KAYAK’s website.
The task for this project is to understand the challenges and preferences of users when planning group travel and design based on these findings.
The research involved reviewing recent journal articles and reports to explore past, present, and future trends in individual and group travel.
The analysis focused on five key areas:● Current travel trends
● Majority demographic
● Challenges
● Priorities
● Competitor group travel companies
After gathering data through secondary research, 18 total interviews are conducted to gain insightful information regarding user patterns and preferences about group travel. The research is aims to identify the specific demographic we are targeting and to understand their trip-planning processes.
A platform for Millennials and older Gen Z friends to find the best trips and stays within their budget
They also need an efficient way to communicate and organize plans within their group
Communication is the key
People choose the most common dates
Compromise and leadership are necessary
Key factors: budget, location, and cost
Deciding on a trip destination is difficult
To better understand and confirm the pain points users face during travel planning, Reddit was explored for additional insights.
Searches using key phrases like"group travel challenges"and "group travel budget splitting strategies" provided a clearer picture of common struggles in the trip planning process.
Designed two protocols to understand users' priorities and the real-time process of planning a group trip.
One allowed users to freely choose any travel site to plan their trip, while the other started them on KAYAK.
Users' actions, frustrations, and overall process are observed. Feedback was then collected on their thoughts and feelings about the experience.
Users tend to begin the planning process by selecting a location
Once the location is chosen, they focus on deciding dates or budget
Research shows that the planning process is not linear
Instead, users consider budget, location, and travel dates simultaneously rather than in a set order
The highlighted area shows the focus of the design recommendations, emphasizing the early planning and discovery stages to match KAYAK's goals. Since KAYAK already offers users a wealth of data and information, the goal is to improve how the platform helps users plan trips and book items more smoothly.
To better understand of the features provided on KAYAK’s Website, I underwent an exploration of KAYAK’s site to plan a hypothetical trip
This allowed exploration of scheduling features in trip planning and provided insight into the user experience. This was crucial for assessing KAYAK’s position relative to other travel planning platforms, as the competitive analysis would have been incomplete without it
After conducting secondary research and discussing competitors with our sponsor, this project outlines various travel companies that compete with KAYAK
The outcome was organized into categories: Budget, Location, Dates, Opportunities, and Things to Avoid. The evaluation specifically focused on collaboration tools used by other companies to assess their effectiveness
