The Challenge
Umi’s typical hotel-agency client base (independent hotels, low traffic, third-party booking engines with limited scope for customisation) made day-to-day conversion rate optimisation difficult to embed as a routine service, since genuine experimentation needs traffic volume and checkout-flow control that most clients simply didn’t have. As Umi began attracting larger, higher-traffic hospitality and travel accounts, this found a natural home in Apochi, a Dutch-based OTA specialising in travel to Iran, spanning hotels, flights, visas, tours, transfers and buses: a platform genuinely comparable in complexity to a small booking site.
The Outcome
The testing programme stalled before hypotheses were scored and tests were executed, likely due to the disruption around COVID. The surviving evidence of this work is the audit itself: an unusually detailed, applied UX and CRO diagnostic across a live, complex, multi-vertical OTA platform, genuine original analysis rather than templated advice.
The Approach
Synthesised established CRO methodology (funnel-stage mapping, the PIE prioritisation framework, structured hypothesis-writing, and a published 8-week CRO programme structure) into a productised offering for the travel and hospitality sector, built as a branded slide deck used to open sales conversations as Umi’s accounts grew larger and more suited to CRO practice. Applied the same thinking directly to Apochi: mapped customer funnels across each of the business’s lines, conducted a full page-by-page UX audit of the live site identifying specific, concrete problems, including inconsistent UI styles across different booking flows, unclear iconography, weak trust signals at payment, and slow-loading results pages, defined an event-tracking plan, and set industry benchmark baselines (page load, bounce rate, conversion rate, email and paid-ad benchmarks) to measure against.
