Industry UX Research

Travel Tours & Experience Booking Website UX Research

A large-scale research study on how to optimize the online User Experience specifically for Travel Tours & Experience Booking websites.

At Baymard Institute, we have a whole User Experience research topic devoted specifically to Travel Tours & Experience Booking websites.

This research study examines what users expect and how they behave online as they explore, browse, evaluate, and book tickets at small- and medium-sized websites offering local tours and experiences.

The study examines both what users think when they initially land on the homepage, how they perform their tours and experience search queries depending on their travel context, how they evaluate and compare the results and listings, use map views, read up on tour and experience details, use image galleries – and, of course, what users think and where they get stuck during the booking and checkout flow itself.

Through our 150,000+ hours of large-scale UX research, we’ve identified 280+ in-depth User Experience guidelines that are particularly important to Tours & Experience Booking websites. The majority of the UX research findings also apply to ticketing and event sites in general (outside the travel industry).

The tested Tours & Experience websites in our study include:

  • Helicopter tours of New York City: HeliNY Sightseeing, New York Helicopter Tours, Zip Aviation
  • River tours and lake cruises in Chicago: Shoreline Sightseeing, Tall Ship Windy, Wendella
  • Guided tours and activities in Hawaii: Blue Hawaiian Activities, Roberts Hawaii, Volcano Tours
  • Group walking tours in London: Fun London Tours, Golden Tours, London Top Sights
  • Guided tours and adventures in Iceland: Arctic Adventures, Gray Line Iceland, Reykjavik Excursions

Travel Tours & Experience Booking UX Insights from Baymard

Baymard’s tours and experience UX research is based on more than 300 qualitative participant/site usability test sessions following the “Think Aloud” protocol. During testing, the participants encountered 1,200+ medium-to-severe usability issues on the Travel Tours & Experience Booking websites while searching for, comparing, and booking tours and experiences for their next trip.

This page provides you with a brief overview of Baymard’s Travel Tours & Experience Booking UX research. Full access to all of our Travel Tours & Experience Booking UX research is available as part of Baymard Premium.


Travel Tours & Experience Booking Website UX Performance

 

We’ve conducted a UX benchmark assessing 7 Travel Tours & Experience Booking websites across 340+ research-based UX parameters relevant to Travel Tours & Experience Booking websites. The benchmarked sites includes: Sea Paradise, Extranomical Tours, Wild Rover Tours, Sea Saffron, Much Better Adventures, Ziptrek Ecotours, and Take Walks. You can view the sites’ desktop and mobile UX performance in the graph above, which summarizes 2,500+ weighted UX performance scores.

You can expand each theme and topic in the graph above for an in-depth view of the ‘current state’ of Travel Tours & Experience Booking website UX performances. (scroll down to access the in-depth case-studies for each of the sites)

This is a sub-set of the full benchmark which includes 251 e-commerce sites.
Explore UX Benchmark


7 Travel Tours & Experience Booking UX Case-Studies

You can explore our in-depth UX case-studies of the below Travel Tours & Experience Booking websites. In total, these contain 2,500+ UX performance scores and 1,500+ best practice examples from Travel Tours & Experience Booking websites.


Articles on Travel Tours & Experience Booking Website UX

FREE RESEARCH CONTENT

We’ve released a small subset of the 280+ Premium UX research findings for Travel Tours & Experience Booking sites for free in these articles:


Get Full Access to our Travel Tours & Experience Booking UX research with Baymard Premium

PAID RESEARCH CONTENT

With Baymard Premium, you get access to 280+ UX guidelines relevant to improving Travel Tours & Experience Booking websites. On top of this, you also get access to 175,000+ best practice examples and 275,000+ UX performance scores from other industries - sometimes the best designs and ideas come by looking outside your own industry.

Learn more about Baymard Premium access


‘Travel Tours & Experience Booking’ Website UX Audit

IN-DEPTH REVIEW OF YOUR SITE’S UX PERFORMANCE

If you don’t want to read all of the research findings, but “just want the results”, then have Baymard’s team of researchers audit your Tours & Experience Booking site.

The audit provides you with a detailed external review of your Tours & Experience Booking website’s UX performance across 340+ UX parameters, as well as a detailed UX performance comparison against 7 leading Travel Tours & Experience Booking websites. The UX audit also provides you with 40 prioritized suggestions for UX improvements, with best-practice implementation examples.

Learn more about Travel Tours & Experience Booking UX audits


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Test Methodology

This UX research on tours and experience websites is part of Baymard Institute’s full 150,000+ hours of large-scale research catalog, which is based on:

  • Usability Testing: 25 rounds of qualitative usability testing with 4,400+ test subject/site sessions following the “Think Aloud” protocol (mainly in-person 1:1 moderated lab usability testing). This includes testing Helicopter tours of New York City (HeliNY Sightseeing, New York Helicopter Tours, Zip Aviation), River tours and lake cruises in Chicago (Shoreline Sightseeing, Tall Ship Windy, Wendella), Guided tours and activities in Hawaii (Blue Hawaiian Activities, Roberts Hawaii, Volcano Tours), Group walking tours in London (Fun London Tours, Golden Tours, London Top Sights), and Guided tours and adventures in Iceland (Arctic Adventures, Gray Line Iceland, Reykjavik Excursions).
  • Manual benchmarking: 54 rounds of benchmarking the world’s 251 top websites across 650+ UX guidelines (175,000+ implementation examples and 275,000+ UX performance scores). The UX benchmarking includes Sea Paradise, Extranomical Tours, Wild Rover Tours, Sea Saffron, Much Better Adventures, Ziptrek Ecotours, and Take Walks.
  • In-lab eye-tracking testing.
  • Quantitative studies: 12 studies with a total of 20,240 participants.

Baymard’s research methodology is described in detail here.