Redesigning MakeMyTrip’s Multicity Journey
The Information Technology boom has changed the face of the Tourism Industry in the recent past, catapulting the number of online travel bookings way ahead of their offline counterparts. Of the 148 million online travel bookings in 2018, 82% occurred without any human interaction, via mobile apps or websites. A large number of online travel-booking platforms mushroomed across the nation as this revolution unfolded and of these platforms, MakeMyTrip (MMT) clearly managed to understand the market and its needs better than most. In no time, it stood out as the industry leader.
The secret to MMT’s mammoth success is greatly attributed to the seamless experience its platform provides to the end user, amongst other things. As a regular user of MMT, there would always be an undercurrent of suggestions which would flow in my head regarding their booking flow, especially for the multicity flight bookings. Life came full circle when I got a chance to work on this particular booking flow and all the oblivious ideas came to life.
Even though majority of the travellers use the Internet for the bulk of their travel planning, yet the online booking experience for a big part of these users is still broken. These users are the ones that represent the highest value to the platform. The ones that that book multicity journey.
The goal of this redesign project was to simplify the user’s journey to book a multicity flight.
What is Multicity flight booking
A multicity flight is an itinerary that does not follow a typical there-and-back pattern, but instead goes from Point A to Point B and on to Point C (and possibly Point D, etc). A multicity itinerary can be used to create a layover, visit several cities in one trip, or fly back to a different airport than where you started.
Currently MMT allows you to choose between roundtrip, one-way, or multicity when looking for flights. Once you choose the multicity option, you can keep adding flights upto 5 legs and dates until your trip is complete. When you’re done, you’ll have all of your flights on one itinerary.
The Challenge
Currently, we are showing all the combinations possible for multicity trips to the user. which overwhelms the user with too many options. For example, if for DEL-BOM | BOM — LKO, there are 20 flights for trip 1 and 20 flights for trip 2, the product would display 20x20 = 400 combinations to the user. Even though this made it simpler for MMT to display the combined price and the available discount on it, it becomes very cumbersome for the user to find the desired flight combination.
Issues In the Current Journey
- There is no flexibility to change individual trip flights
- Too many flight combination options
- On the itinerary page, the exact route for the journey is not clear
- Information on individual journey is difficult to grasp
- Users may feel that there is no value-add with multicity, they’d rather book individual flights. They seldom realise that the combination is at a discounted price.
- Individual flight cost is not displayed which makes it very difficult for the user to compare flights.
Research
As a part of my initial research, I did a thorough competitive analysis. I observed that majority of the OTA platforms had the same journey with the same issues. This was because of one reason -
When it comes to multicity flights, it’s typically cheaper to lump them together on one itinerary instead of buying one-way flights. The reason is because all the flights in a single itinerary are of the same airlines or between airlines that have a partnership. These itineraries are discounted by the airlines and hence they rank on the top of the funnel.
Breaking them apart and giving the user the flexibility to select their flights will take away these discounts as there are no discounts for individual flights.
However this is no reason to deprive the user the choice of their flights. Users not only care for the price but also convenience.
There were two major considerations when designing multicity Journey:
- Give the user the choice to select their flights for each leg
- Letting the user understand the discounts for the flight combination.
Ideation
With the basic structure established, I designed high fidelity wireframes that helped me communicate design concepts to company stakeholders.
After a series of discussions, we finalised Option 5 for final designs.
Page Elements
Multicity Revised Journey
Now with the revised designs, when the user comes to the listing page for a Multicity journey, we give them the best preselected option for the journey which considers price and convenience alike. The flight selection highlights the discounts and all the other flight details
However if the user chose to change a particular flight, the algorithm will auto-select the most suitable flight in the next leg. It will not change the flight selected by the user in the previous trip as the user has already expressed their intent for that particular flight. This will reflect how the discount, if any has been removed or added. Incase the user makes a selection for say a flight in the second leg for a time after the third leg flight, it will auto change the third flight to a flight with significant gap after the second flight.
Once the mobile designs were finalised, I worked on the desktop designs. The journey remained the same.
So finally with the new designs
- Users will now have the choice to select their preferred flight in each trip.
- Users will be able to differentiate between discounted and non-discounted flights
- Users will see the total trip cost at all points in the journey
- The continue buttons at the bottom are renamed as “Select Next Flight” till the second last leg and on the last leg as “Book Now” to make the journey clear.
