Van der Valk, founded in 1939, has been one of the largest hospitality organizations in the Netherlands for years and this year was named a ‘Customer Experience Excellence Leader’ by KPMG. Van der Valk has been active on the Internet for some time and was one of the first Dutch companies with a website in 1996: Valk.nl. At the time, there was quite some discussion about why on earth to pay 25 guilders per year to register a domain name, but fortunately it was registered anyway.

The company has a rich history and part of that is a now 10-year successful partnership with Online Dialogue in the field of conversion optimization.

Starting in 2008, it was possible on the Van der Valk websites to pay online. This of course created a whole host of new possibilities. Therefore, in 2009 the question was asked whether it was possible to increase the return on investment of the Van der Valk websites. With this question, Van der Valk ended up at Online Dialogue.

The first A/B test

Together with Online Dialogue, we looked at the functionalities of the websites and concluded that, because of the number of visitors and bookings, the reservations overview page was a good place to start optimizing.

10 years ago, it began A/B testing at Van der Valk with this elaboration:

Here several more variants were tested, with variant B adding all options and then variants C, D and E testing each option separately. This test involved the following hypotheses:

• “The page is unclear: there should be a clear book hotel room action button in the picture, this will lead to more conversions.”
• “Extra promotion of last-minutes, deals and packages leads to more unique visitors buying something.”.
• “We have to convince the customer to book with us and we do that by highlighting the free cup of coffee and the free Wifi.”

This test concluded that:

• Showing free coffee & Wifi has no significant effect on conversion rate
• Last-minutes, packages and offers are distracting and therefore generate fewer conversions.
• A clear call-to-action button leads to at least 13% more conversions.

This first test was followed by many more on Van der Valk's websites. And A/B testing has taken the Van der Valk websites very far and still does to this day. It hardly ever happens that Online Dialogue does not have a test live on the Van der Valk websites, the reason being that A/B testing is a proven success for Van der Valk. Adjustments that could affect the visitor's booking process are always tested first before they are implemented on the websites.

10 years of A/B testing at Van der Valk

Of course, after 10 years of testing, a website also comes to look very different, but in essence, of course, A/B testing has not changed. A nice example of a recent test on Van der Valk's websites is the following:

Above is the ‘check account’ page in the booking process. This page is for entering the email address and checking the booking after the visitor has chosen a room. We noticed that people regularly dropped out at this step in the booking process, so Online Dialogue came up with the following hypothesis:

• “By moving the information visitors need to verify they have clicked on the right room to above the fold, it makes it easier for visitors to go through the check account step (increase fluency), which means more visitors will complete their booking.”

With this hypothesis, a test was set up that resulted in a high uplift in the number of completed bookings, which was obviously a cool result. This actually raised the question of what else we could achieve on this page by removing content. So two more tests were done with the removal of unnecessary content and with more focus on completing the email address. Both tests were again ‘winners’ in the number of completed bookings, so Van der Valk's ‘check account’ page now looks like this:

As a result, Van der Valk and Online Dialogue learned that guests were not looking to check their booking on this page at all. This step in the booking process at Van der Valk has become a lot more functional and that translates into a significant increase in the number of completed bookings.

Always keep testing

The result of the collaboration between Van der Valk and Online Dialogue shows that you should never stop testing, let data speak for itself and always ask the question: what is the next step?

After 10 years, we can look back with pleasure on a fruitful cooperation in the field of conversion optimization. A lot has been learned and looking back at the website of 10 years ago and the website of today, you can say that the story of Van der Valk and Online Dialogue is a success story.