It was Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu who said: “a journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” But that was way back in the 4th century B.C. For today’s travelers, their journey begins with many clicks, searches and a lot of time spent comparing prices, referencing maps and reading reviews.

Traveling—and all the logistical decisions that come with it—requires meticulous research and planning. And with the majority of travel planning now happening in the digital space, travel and hospitality brands are seeing the benefit of using experimentation to optimize their online booking experiences. Ultimately, this was one of the driving forces behind InterContinental Hotels Group’s (IHG®) decision to engage us.

IHG is a hospitality company headquartered in Denham, United Kingdom. Their portfolio of hotels includes InterContinental® Hotels & Resorts, Kimpton® Hotels & Restaurants, Crowne Plaza® Hotels & Resorts, Holiday Inn®, and Holiday Inn Express®— brands that are known and loved by millions of consumers around the world.

The IHG homepage search feature serves as the primary entry point to the company’s booking funnel. Testing this feature made sense, as it’s located on one of the most trafficked pages on the site, and supported IHG’s goal of driving more hotel bookings.

Through analyzing IHG’s quantitative data and conducting additional qualitative UX research, we found the number of tabs and options available distracted visitors from their core purpose of researching hotels. From this research, a hypothesis emerged: IHG needed to simplify. By eliminating points of friction within the homepage booking module, IHG would then increase booking conversions.

The homepage test took approximately two weeks to plan and design, with an additional ten days for development and QA. The experiment ran for two weeks, testing two different challengers against IHG’s control experience.