The single test that increased villa bookings by 34%

My name’s Oliver Bell, and I’m the CEO of Oliver’s Travels. We’re specialists in luxury villas, sort of throughout Europe but also more recently, the rest of the world.

Why did you decide to engage Browser to Buyer?

We’ve had really good experience with him before and yeah, we knew, we were very confident of the success.

What is your experience of working with Browser to Buyer?

Responsive, efficient and organized, I guess a lot of things that you would just sort of expect from most agencies you do business with, but then it’s not always the case, so good communication. But the main thing would just be very credible in terms of the kind of data analysis, but also kind of coming up with the ideas for what future tests can be. Because we’ve definitely been led by, it’s not been the case that we’ve been saying, “Oh, we’ve got an idea for this, we’d love to do it.” Obviously that does sometimes happen but most of the time it will be Dave saying, “This is where I think your biggest wins are.” And, you know, most of the time he’s right.

What has been the impact of working with Browser to Buyer?

Over the last few years that we’ve been working together, we run an average of about two tests a month, maybe three, and probably 9 in 10 of them do prove to be winners.

What results did you get through working with Browser to Buyer?

The most successful test to date has been what we call the hold dates test. A typical user journey would be finding the villa they liked and then going to book now and doing the checkout journey. So Dave came up with an idea of trying to push users that weren’t quite yet ready to book the opportunity to hold their dates for 48 hours, which kind of gave them the, I guess the security they needed, that they weren’t gonna lose out on the holiday home. The majority of those then became confirmed bookers, and the overall value to the business led to an uplift in sales of 34%. It was absolutely huge. And there’s a recent, there’s a test that’s going on at the moment which potentially could have the same kind of impact.

How important is Browser to Buyer to your business?

CRO is something we’re just totally committed to, we totally see the value of it and it would be one of the last things we would stop using. And that was actually sort of proved by COVID is that we carried on, even though we had to sort of pause a lot of agencies that we were using, you know, hugely decreased marketing costs. We didn’t stop using Browser to Buyer because we understand the value of it.