Digital Trip enhancements simplify website changes and analytics

Digital Trip has rolled out a series of upgrades to its agent and tour operator technology to make it easier for clients to makes changes to their websites and to access vital business insights.

Digital Trip has rolled out a series of upgrades to its agent and tour operator technology, to make it easier for clients to make changes to their websites and access vital business insights.

The Bournemouth-based travel technology specialist is also poised to roll out improvements to its mobile platform in the first quarter of next year and introduce its own semantic search module towards the end of the second quarter.

Digital Trip currently has semantic search in its mobile solution for voice search, but will start testing new text search boxes with key clients from next year. It will intelligently analyse the words customers input into a free search form and come up with relevant results.

The simplification of the user interface allows customers logged in to their site as administrators to add, remove and tailor modules to requirements, without having to go into the back of the site.

Updates happen instantly once the page is refreshed. A new user-friendly tool bar has been created offering 80 different branding options.

Andy Speight, Digital Trip managing director, said: “We wanted to make it much easier for the average user. You may buy a product from us and tomorrow say I don’t want it like that so you don’t have to come back to us, you can do it yourself.”

Speight said this work to simplify the processes has opened up new business opportunities and helped it pick up clients in Kuwait, Argentina, Australia and Kenya.

For functions that still require using the back end of the website like adding a new staff member, Digital Trip has added a ‘Walk Me Through’ button that takes the user step by step through the process. In time this will also be offered to customers based around frequently asked questions, to help customers find what they are looking for.

Digital Trip has also created specific ‘banks’ for different sectors of produce including flights, beds, transport and events which its customers can load their own products into, and access for product that is not their own.

Speight said this allows niche travel firms to also offer a broader range of product and to link their own stock with flights or other complimentary product. It can also help with distribution, by allowing their own product to be made available to other firms on the Digital Trip system.

To assist with business analytics, customers are now also being offered an enterprise business suite which providing a granular insight into the performance of websites. ‘Live Stats’, effectively a user friendly version of Google Analytics is offered for free, clients get different reporting modules based on the products they are already using in the Digital Trip platform.

This offers 600 pre-set reports which can be tailored to requirements and stored in a ‘My Reports’ area and business alerts can be set up to inform key people of critical pre-defined metrics related to the performance of their websites.

Speight added: “The information is shown in a really quick, visual way about all that’s happening on your website. Live Stats is really for people who don’t understand Google Analytics. The data is a lot harder to access in Google.

“Google Analytics is great but you almost have to be a genius to use it. We can give you much more granular information about your business.”

Among the insights available are search trends, data on where people are searching from and what are the highest volume locations, the favourite airport site users want to fly from, which supplier provides the cheapest deals and which destination returns the most not available results.

It also gives website owners information about look to book rates and shopping cart abandonment data.