The Situation
Zero bookings. Two weeks in. On a platform that knew how to get traction.
A travel platform had launched a new package booking product. The team had done real research before building — the experience was considered and intentional. Two weeks post-launch, traffic was coming in from external search. Not a single booking had been made.
For a platform known for gaining early traction on new offerings, this was highly unusual — and increasingly alarming. The team wasn't sure whether the product was fundamentally flawed, or whether something specific had been missed. They needed a clear-eyed perspective on what was happening before reacting.
Rather than jumping to conclusions or launching an expensive rebuild, I stepped in to make sense of the data first.
Finding the Signal
The data wasn't showing a broken product. It was showing a missing behaviour.
The first step was examining behavioral data to understand how users were actually moving through the product. Google Analytics told a specific story: users were discovering the package pages through external Google search — and then not coming back.
This was a red flag with a very particular shape. The problem wasn't awareness — people were finding the packages. It wasn't the experience itself — they were engaging with it. The problem was what happened after they left.
What we know about how people book travel packages
None of that expected return behaviour was showing up in the data. Users were visiting once — and disappearing. Which meant something was preventing them from coming back.
The Root Cause
A navigation blind spot for a high-consideration purchase.
Digging deeper into the flow, the core issue became clear: there was no way for users to re-access packages they had previously viewed from inside the platform.
One Entry Point — and It Was External
At launch, the only way into the package product was through an external Google search result. When users came back later — landing on the platform homepage as most returning visitors do — there was no entry point to packages anywhere on the page. No navigation link, no featured section, no internal path in. The package experience was effectively invisible from within the platform itself.
No Path Back from the Homepage
Users who had already found a package via Google — and wanted to revisit it days later — had nowhere to go from the platform homepage. No "recently viewed," no breadcrumbs, no internal links. For a high-consideration purchase where repeat visits in Google Analytics are the expected signal of intent, zero repeat visits wasn't a content problem or a price problem. It was a navigation gap that made the product unreachable to its most interested users.
"The product wasn't broken. It was simply incomplete from a user flow perspective — and for a high-consideration purchase, that incompleteness was fatal to conversion."
From Insight to Action
A lightweight fix. No redesign required.
Once the problem was clear, I brought together the designers and product owner to identify a fast, targeted solution. The impulse might have been to redesign the navigation or rebuild the package entry points entirely. The evidence pointed to something much smaller.
Rather than pursuing a full overhaul, the team aligned on a lightweight interim solution that addressed the specific behaviour gap directly.
Recently viewed packages surfaced in the main navigation dropdown — Users landing back on the platform homepage could now see the packages they had already found, directly from the nav. The consideration journey could continue without going back to Google. The path existed where users would naturally look for it — and repeat visit data in Google Analytics confirmed it was being used.
Repeat visits honoured the user's place in the journey — The fix wasn't just technical. It reflected a basic truth about how people make travel decisions: they need to come back, compare, reconsider, and then commit. Designing for that multi-session behaviour — rather than assuming a single-visit journey — was the actual unlock.
The Outcome
Immediate improvement. And a lesson that stayed with the team.
Repeat visits improved immediately after the fix launched. The consideration behaviour that had been completely absent in Google Analytics — users coming back to the homepage, finding their packages, revisiting and comparing — began appearing in the data. Booking conversion followed.
The team walked away with something more durable than a fixed funnel: a sharper understanding of the difference between building a good experience and ensuring users can complete the journey they naturally take. Even well-researched, well-built products can fail silently when the user flow doesn't account for how decisions actually get made.
Results
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immediate lift in repeat visits after the nav fix — the missing behaviour reappeared in Google Analytics
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root cause identified — a navigation blind spot, not a product flaw
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redesign required — a lightweight dropdown resolved what weeks of silence couldn't explain