Booking a holiday with triplets under two
As a mother of triplets, you come across all sorts of challenges in every day life. Including the digital world. For instance, when trying to book a holiday.
A year and a half ago, I became the mother of triplets. To say that it has been a challenge is an understatement. From figuring out how to feed three babies to which baby to pick up first when they all start crying. Some of the biggest challenges come from a society not designed for life with triplets. Finding a suitable stroller or a car that fits three car seats for example. Besides finding these products, I had some challenges in the digital world as well. Booking a holiday with triplets under two is one of these challenges. And being a UX designer, I can’t help but notice elements or flows that could have been designed much better or a lot easier.
The challenge of booking a holiday with triplets
When thinking about planning a holiday with triplets many hurdles come to mind. After we decided on the destination, the online journey started. The first thought was to book a holiday with a travel organisation to have the flight, accommodation and transfer booked in one go. This idea was killed quite quickly as none of the organisations allow you to select two adults and three kids under two. Maybe they could have provided me with a custom offer, but when an interface tells me something is not possible, I will leave the platform and try somewhere else. This could have been prevented if they had told me that for my traveling company, I could contact them to get a custom offer. They offered me a dead end, which is something you want to prevent within UX design.
Booking the flight
Since travel organisations weren’t an option, I started looking at flights directly through airlines. Most airlines have information about booking a separate seat for your baby. But when selecting two adults and three babies in the booking interface, I get an error that this is not an accepted traveling company. At Transavia, the error message tells me that one adult is allowed to travel with two babies, but I need to contact their service center for the actual booking.
When first getting in touch with Transavia through WhatsApp, they told me to: “Make a booking for two adults and two babies. Then make an additional booking for one adult and the third baby. When you reserve chairs, make sure to select seats next to each other.” This sounded strange to me as it involved creating two separate bookings and filling in the same details for one adult twice for one flight. So, I called the service desk and got different instructions this time: “Make a booking for three adults and two babies. When filling in the details of the third adult, fill in your baby’s name and a date of birth making them 18 years or older. Then call us back so we can change the date of birth to the correct date.” This sounds a lot like hacking the system, but it worked and was done quite quickly.
Looking back
When checking the booking all details were stated correctly. It was noted that it was a baby traveling in his own seat and the necessary car seat was also included as luggage. This tells me that apparently the booking system does understand babies traveling in their own seat. Then why not let users book this themselves? I understand I’m one of the edge cases in this situation, but it does not sound like a lot of work to offer the existing logic to the user.
The lack of flexibility and clear instructions led to a frustrating experience, resulting in multiple interactions with customer service. Despite the existing logic within the booking system, it is not made accessible to the user. This unnecessarily complicates the process.
After all, the first challenge has been overcome and the holiday is booked. Now let’s see how a flight and holiday with triplets goes...