Aurinkomatkat app takes home prizes at the Red Dot Design Award “Customer orientation is not just an empty phrase”

The Aurinkomatkat app has been out for just over two years, and both customer feedback and analytics show that travelers have embraced the service. The application won the travel application and user experience/service design categories at the Red Dot Awards. Earlier this spring, Aurinkomatkat also took home awards from the Grand One gala.

“Today, customers expect more from travel agencies and tour operators. In addition to easy-to-use booking systems, people also demand solid digital services during their trip,” says Elina Martikainen, product owner of the Aurinkomatkat app. “We tried to strike the perfect balance between ease of independent use and offering help whenever the customer needs it.”

The Aurinkomatkat app provides guidance and suggests activities to travelers at the destination, and it has an easy-to-use customer service chat feature for contacting the local tour guides. Local schedules, weather information, excursion sales and offline maps make it easy to plan your holidays.

The release of the app increased excursion sales by 78 percent, and travelers who used the app felt that their trip was more successful than those who did not.

A great service requires customer orientation, analytics and expertise

In the design phase, we conducted extensive user interviews and tapped the expertise of the whole Aurinkomatkat organization, starting with the local tour guides. We also took analytics seriously from the start and immediately began improving the service on the basis of user analytics.

“Focusing on the customer’s needs and what the customer wants will also achieve business targets,” says Qvik’s AD Liisa Stenberg, who has been involved with the design and concepting of both the Aurinkomatkat app and the new travel search function of the Aurinkomatkat website. “Customer orientation is not just an empty phrase, it has a real impact on sales.”

The application was designed in cooperation with Nextage Design. Qvik was in charge of the technical implementation, while the back-end systems were the work of Avarko and CGI.

Qvik’s customers have done well at the Red Dot Awards in the past too. Last year, awards were won by the MaaS service Whim and smart ring developer Oura.