Expedia.ca’s Homepage Makeover

Here at Expedia.ca, we have the pleasure of helping Canadians find their dream trip every single day. Whether you’re taking the family to Disney, going on a girls’ trip to Vegas or finally seeing the lights of Paris, for many people, the first place they start when they are researching their trip is the Expedia.ca homepage. In fact, as far as online travel destinations go, it’s fair to say our homepage is one of the most frequently visited.

That’s why it’s so exciting to officially unveil our redesigned homepage. As Canada’s leading online travel provider, there’s a lot of your travel happiness at stake when it comes to our homepage. When you consider the scale at which we operate and how many of you stop here first on your way to a big trip, making significant changes to the page you see first can have real impact on all of the travellers who have been familiar with that page for more than a decade.  But here’s the thing:  travellers today are incredibly different than they were when we first launched the site.

The rise of mobile is one such factor that has changed the way Canadians travel.  With this in mind, we kept the Canadian mobile traveller front and center in our homepage facelift. We started from the ground up and considered various elements we think travellers will appreciate: not only today, but in the future as well. We built the site with responsive design as a priority; we know people are accessing our site across an array of devices and it needs to work on all of them, even as more devices come on the market in the coming years. We want to ensure the work we’re doing today on our homepage will resonate later, regardless of device type.

Page load time is another area we knew we had to radically rethink. People visiting Expedia.ca don’t have the time to sit around and wait for webpages to load, especially when on their mobile device. Since mobile travellers are operating on their cell networks, the content needs to show up quickly without impeding on your cell data. After loads of testing, we’re pleased to share that we’ve cut the load time of our booking wizard nearly in half: from more than 2 seconds to just over 1 second. This allows customers to quickly start searching, planning and booking their travel.

At Expedia.ca, we’re rather disciplined about testing. Before releasing a new homepage to the public, we have been diligently testing it behind the scenes. The responses have been quite positive. The first thing people comment on is the big, bold, beautiful picture that appears behind the search fields to take the task of travel planning from mundane to magnificent. From there, the new search interface is put at the forefront of the customer’s experience: simple entry choices and clear search options as well as smart recommendations to get you on the path to paradise with fewer clicks.

Based on feedback received throughout testing, we think this makeover will bring you one of the best customer experiences available in online travel, inspiring you with beautiful imagery while getting you closer to the trip of your dream on whatever device you choose. Take a look at the new homepage and tell us what you think.