Price Match Promise tone & voice evolution

Flight Price Match Promise (FPMP) is an Expedia assurance product that lets users benefit from future drops in their flight price for a fee. When a traveler adds FPMP to their flight, Expedia checks price changes on their behalf every 24 hours, and reports it using the Price Check page. If the flight price drops, the difference of the prices is automatically refunded to the traveler. Travelers can also check prices manually at any time on the Price Check page.

Given the importance of the Price Check page, we used messaging on it as the starting point for tone & voice improvements, which would then be rolled out to other key content types in the PMP ecosystem.

OLD Price Check page

Situation

• There was a need to revamp the user messaging to highlight intangible value that users derived out of the product, and not just monetary refunds. In particular, the new messaging would focus on situations:
  • where the flight price remained constant; no change
  • where the flight price increased
• The version of messaging live as of late 2018 was not conversational or friendly. There was ample scope to use tones of voice that evoked the right emotions in customers: 
  • feeling smart 
  • feeling in control 
  • feeling that Expedia is on their side 
  • feeling that they didn’t have to manually track prices, etc

• Define the right content elements for Price Check page messaging and their jobs; see detailed strategy
• Define tone & voice elements aligned with the following goals:
  • Making the right connect with the customer
  • Establishing value of no-claim through feel-good messaging highlighting automated checks and timing-sensitive input
  • Making the messaging (content) and the chart (design) cohesively tell the full story
• Test the revamped messaging with real users and iterate
• Scale the tone & voice strategy to other pieces of PMP messaging: emails, SMS messages, app notifications, etc

Design and test the new messaging for the Price Check page.

Select snapshots

Scenario	Before	After
First status
No price change (no refund)
Price increase (no refund)
Price drop (refund scenario)
Final message/no price change (no refund)
Final message/price increase (no refund)

The messaging changes drove impressive user engagement gains while keeping comprehension scores intact. Test users felt that that the new messaging inspired confidence and was reassuring in its tone. The updated content also contributed to an increase in the real-time positive feedback received for the product.