Innovative search interface will make booking travel online, enjoyable once again.
From Wednesday 24 June, the thousands of Brits who search for flights and hotels with Cheapflights.co.uk will discover a new meta site that will put simplicity and customer enjoyment back into online travel booking, a market that has become excessively crowded and cluttered.
Eighteen years after its inception as the leading online publisher of travel deals, Cheapflights.co.uk will enter the first phase of a new journey. A clean and modern design will ensure ease of navigation, with one-click filters that will serve up the cheapest and quickest option for any journey in an instant, sparing users from wading through irrelevant search results. A new Smart Value rating will also display results determined to provide the optimum balance between travel duration and cost.
“Cheapflights’ evolution into meta is about giving our users a transparent view across the market while making their experience simple and efficient,” says Hugo Burge, CEO of Momondo Group, which operates the Cheapflights business. “Booking travel is meant to be an exciting process but the wealth of choice and complexity of options often makes it overwhelming. We’re putting an end to that and providing a single source that drowns out the unnecessary online noise. This is the start of an exciting new chapter for us, where we focus on making products that users love – which is now at the heart of our DNA. The Cheapflights.co.uk transition is a historic moment for us and I’m especially proud of our teams efforts.”
The new site design has already proven successful in several overseas markets including Australia, South Africa and, most recently, Canada. The user response to each has been overwhelmingly positive with an 85% global increase in direct users to the Cheapflights websites over last year, as a result of the rapid growth of the newly designed test sites.
Responding to the ongoing explosion of mobile booking in the UK, the new Cheapflights site will be mobile-optimised and supported by an app that uses the same simple interface. 54% of Cheapflights UK customers are using mobile and tablet to search. The app has already had nearly a million downloads from markets all over the world.
Empowering users to quickly filter out unwanted results, the meta site will offer the ability to set the required departure and/or arrival time for each leg of their journey and to select preferred airports and airlines. The site pools the results from Cheapflights’ extensive array of airline, hotel and OTA partners to ensure users are able to find the best price possible.
With hidden fees having been a black mark against the travel industry in recent years, Cheapflights has ensured complete transparency for all fares displayed, with one click providing a complete rundown of all associated costs including booking fees, baggage charges and other included ancillary costs. And, to make search and comparing easier, the site also offers the option to select an outbound flight and then pair all the return options. Users also have the ability to pin choices that look promising to the top of the list for comparison as they continue to sort and filter options.
Cheapflights will continue with the publishing of deals in its rapidly growing newsletter business globally. While consumers have a thirst to find great deals in the market, Cheapflights will continue to provide this relevant service for its subscribers.
The new site is live now.
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For further information please contact:
Nick Wheywell / Stuart Fyfe / Sakhita Sharma
E: [email protected]
T: 0203 440 8930
About Cheapflights.co.uk, a part of the Momondo Group: “Let’s Open our World.”
Momondo Group is an online travel media and technology company that is driven by the belief that an open world is a better world. The group now serves travel search and inspiration to over 17.5 million visitors a month – plus 7 million travel newsletter subscribers – via its Cheapflights (www.cheapflights.co.uk/) and momondo (www.momondo.com) brands.
Skygate began the sourcing of complex air-travel data in 1992, whilst Cheapflights pioneered the online comparison of flight deals for users in 1996 and momondo launched meta-search in the Nordic countries from 2006.
The Group has offices in London, Copenhagen and Boston, with a consumer base across more than 30 core international markets and engaged travellers, explorers and holiday-makers all over the world.
Follow us on Twitter: @Cheapflights
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