Learning from the world’s leading travel websites

I wrote an article for UX Magazine (based on my research for Lionbridge) that highlights global best practices in the travel industry.

Travelers want websites that travel with them
In the travel industry, your customers are mobile. If you greet them with a “select country” pull-down menu, they might wonder if you’re asking for their home country, departing country, or destination country. Which means you need to invest a great deal of planning into your global gateway.

More important, you need to offer users a consistent language experience across any device they may be using. It’s a mystery to me why a company will localize its website into 30 languages and only localize its mobile app into five or six languages (I’ve seen many instances of this).The irony here is that mobile apps, if developed properly, can be localized more cost effectively than websites.

The linguistic “syncing” of websites, mobile sites, and apps is a hot topic among many of the companies I’ve spoken with this year — across all industries. Given the rise of Internet usage on mobile devices, it’s fair to say that all Internet users want websites that travel with them.

John Yunker
John Yunker

John is co-founder of Byte Level Research and author of Think Outside the Country as well as 19 editions of The Web Globalization Report Card.

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