05 December, 2008： Thomas Cook UK & Ireland holidaymakers are being given the option of writing independent online reviews of their holidays.
More than 300,000 people who have travelled in the last 12 months have added their holiday and hotel ratings to www.thomascook.com.
The facility is part of a new e-commerce platform upon which the Thomas Cook website now operates.
The holiday search section has been revamped with more content, imagery and videos. New maps, customer ratings, reviews and advanced search filters have been introduced.
The company can also personalise and tailor content based on user preferences or behaviour.
E-commerce director Russell Gould said: “Travellers will continue to use on and offline channels through their holiday research and booking journey.
“This new e-commerce platform is not only a website, but will quickly evolve into a multi-channel sales platform that delivers a unique and best-in-class customer experience for all travel related purchases.
“Over the coming year, we will enhance it further and plan to roll it across all our sales channels. Our ability to tailor and personalise content to individual visitor preferences is an incredibly powerful marketing tool. This is a huge leap that provides www.thomascook.com with the capability to present relevant tailored offers and promotions to our online customers.”
He added: “Our aim is to ensure we present a realistic and impartial view of each holiday and hotel, which is why we have created the functionality for our customers to complete reviews.
“We are also introducing new processes that will allow visitors to filter to relevant reviews from similar travellers, for instance, only reviews from people who have travelled as a family with young children can be selected.”
“ ‘Accommodation Only’ conversion from search to purchase has doubled and tailor-made ‘Flight & Hotel’ searches have already increased by 70%, leading to an increase in bookings by over 100% in October alone.
“We still have a lot of other processes to implement, but results so far indicate we are definitely heading in the right direction with the new site.”
