Transport Direct grabs 12 million web visitors

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Strong data and attention to users is the key to gaining 12 million website users in less than two years, according to the chief executive of travel planning site Transport Direct.

Nick Illsley told attendees of the Transport 07 conference at the Barbican in London that good data is key to the website's continuing success.

The site is owned by a consortium led by Atos Origin, with public funding from the Department of Transport, the Welsh Assembly Government and the Scottish Executive. Its first full year of operation was 2005. In that year, it aimed for a million users, but hit three million. It now expects 12 million visits annually. Illsley said the site had a 93 per cent satisfaction rate.

More interestingly, a fifth of all people accessing the site changed the way they intended to travel because of information they discovered he said, while nearly half used the site to find a more efficient way to take a journey they'd previously made.

But the site isn't being used for sales, as just one per cent of users go through to buy tickets via the site.

Indeed the site's data is its draw. Illsley told an anecdote about one man using the site not for travel plans, but to find his friends' postcodes to send Christmas cards.

"The biggest challenge is data and data is dull," he said, asking the audience not to laugh the employees who handle the site's data. "They're they most important people in the whole chain."

Websites need to be more intuitive or people will leave, he said, suggesting we look to children playing video games for proof. "If they're not on level two or three after 20 minutes, the game's crap - not them, the game," he said, saying people don't blame themselves if they can't find information, they blame the website.

And accuracy is key, given the high usage of the site and the many different routes which get recommended for every query, Illsley said. There are 30 million possible origins and destinations in the UK, and 340,000 transport possibilities, creating 100 billion potential routes, he said. "If we were 99 per cent accurate - and I wish we were - we'd have a billion wrong answers," he said.

Creating a service-oriented website such as Transport Direct means balancing users, industry, politics and technology - and prioritising them in that order, too. Technology is the least important concern, he said, so long as you get your plans right. "Get your specs right and suppliers will deliver," he said. "It's the business spec that's usually gone wrong."

But balancing so many concerns means accepting lower levels of performance, Illsley said. Giving priority to one area - be it speed, comprehensive information or ease of use - means the others suffer, so Transport Direct had to work to find a balance.

The site may be a success, but it's not waiting for others to catch up, Illsley said. "When you're the world's first, you're the best in the world - but it doesn't mean you're world class," he said. "We want to be like Google or Lastminute.com."

The site has plans to allow users to search by price and mix private and public travel methods, he said. It will also eventually include cycling journeys. But those are basic changes compared to what Illsley has planned next. He said he hopes to add real-time travel updates and push out the data on Google or BBC as well.

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