Web development of a travel site has its specific peculiarities.

The main difficulty of working on such portals lies in “processing” of a big amount of data which must be provided to potential clients in attractive, and, the main thing, perfect working condition.

Since the idea of such site is to give a user what he or she is looking for! With a careful approach to creation and testing of travel portals, you can increase the future sales by 60% and make the website visit conversion very high.

What Client Understands as a Travel Site?

Before analyzing the peculiarities of such category of sites, you must understand what we are facing as QA testers. Usually, it can be:

• Specialized website of a travel agency;
• The network of websites of particular tour operator;
• Outreach web pages describing the travels and peculiarities of the world tourism.

Each of them has its own specifics both in external (visual part) and program stuffing. Let’s overview the similar moments which are used to some extent when speaking about a travel site.

The classic requirements are exact compliance with the topic of a portal: usually, it is reached by using well-known patterns – tourist maps, beaches, globes, images of nature or popular architectural attractions. But sometimes it’s very hard to avoid stereotypes and, in this case, trivial errors and bugs arise which are not found on the stage of testing and the released product is unfinished.

So what is the idea of travel site? Selling tours and as many as possible!

It’s very important, working with such portal, not to face a situation when really important information was hidden behind a useless content (such as all kinds of bright blocks, animation passages, showing an ordinary attempt to pull the wool over the people’s eyes.)

[highlight dark=”no”]Remember! – the design must not be so important giving way to such important factors as usability and simplicity of user navigation.[/highlight]

The travel industry is such a thing where information tends to outdate very fast and lose its original importance. This means that a travel portal must be technically dynamic and flexible and efficiently change its informational consistency.

So it’s very important, at the development stage, to create multi-functional CMS system which panel gives you a possibility to quickly put new information and edit the current one. It’s very important to create and test the product which can be used even by a non-expert in IT who can just click few buttons and save text blocks.

All this must be taken into account not only on the stage of a page making development but also on the stage of testing the project by QA department.

Performing testing of a travel site, it’s important to pay special attention to such thing as a search engine and filtering settings of data obtained.

Typically a user after visiting website understands what exactly he or she is looking for and what place to travel to. A well-designed and visually simple site must give him or her actual information just in a few clicks.

So you must build the process of testing and then test a site in such way that you can make a quite clear leap in the logic of actions.

Also never forget about such important detail of any specialized travel site as the logic of online reservation. Since every visitor can wish here and now to book a place in the hotel somewhere on the coast of the Pacific ocean.

Travel agency personnel will have to receive and register incoming applications but the correction and testing of the module performance must be done by the testers who must create an exhaustive list of the possible test cases which can be really executed by an ordinary user (both positive and negative scripts). You must very attentively check correct information visualization since even a slight error (date change or incorrect text message) can greatly damage the reputation of the company.

[highlight dark=”no”]It’s very important, while testing of the logic of online reservation, to automatically test the system in order to decrease the time and work spent on incoming data processing.[/highlight]

 

Peculiarities of Testing the Maintenance of Different Travel Sites

Though first two types of sites have very similar structure and logic, the third ones have its own peculiarities.

The third type is aimed to deter user on specific pages as long as possible. So you must create and test the portal filled with the maximum number of information blocks, the content of which will be helpful for a user.

For example, online consultation module is very important for any site of travel agency or tour operator.

Clients must get uninterrupted online performance in consulting with the company personnel (to ask about the travel details, to book a tour in time, to receive information about the costs of the tickets, etc.)

Such things are not important for a simple information portal as its main task is continuous visual “surfing” the web pages of a travel portal performed by a client.

Various stories, travel reports, articles – all this information is used on tourism portals not just because of a text content. So our task as testers is to check the correctness of the content of these pages and the correctness of information on the screens of different devices.

Widgets of social networks are very often connected to such sites. This gives the clients a possibility to quickly and comfortably exchange the messages and share site posts in their personal accounts.

Are you testing a travel site? Never forget about such important block as background information with full information on forms, embassy addresses, samples of agreements and other documents needed for traveling.

The Main Parts of Efficient Travel Site or What Must Be Primarily Tested

• Efficient interface. In a visual sense, your portal must show not only the specifics of your company or firm but be completely comfortable for the client. Always check the harmony of the visual interface of your design and also monitor the good performance of the whole web resource;
• Complete compliance with target auditory. What is the reason for visiting the travel site? Yes, to get complete satisfaction of their needs! This means that you must thoroughly work on the strategy of testing the functionality of every block, page of the site;
• Easy navigation. Portal clients must easily find the content they are looking for, so a tester, designer and template designer must together make the final variant of design and its logic of work to give the user a possibility to reach a target (buy a tour, look at hotel booking, etc.)
• Reliability. The efficiency of any travel portal directly depends on its reliability. That means that QA thoroughly tests the site work in peak load intervals and also pay attention to how long the pages are loaded, is information changed depending on the Internet speed, etc.

Are you still thinking that travel site testing is easy and tedious work? So get a good advice to improve your testing skills.

According to analytical information of Dashlane company, only 11 % of travel portals worldwide are safe to use. Many portals don’t have two-factor authentication and in some of them you can use a simple combination from 1 to 5 as a password or type a word “password”.

So the type of work is always determined and outsource QA department must be always ready, so that the next time while making such rating, the site tested by you will be in a list of the safest and more comfortable travel sites.