By Expedia Guest Author, on September 19, 2013

HTML5 mobile flights experience

Today on the blog, Sophyan Julio, Product Manager at Expedia, shares some exciting new updates to the mobile web experience of Expedia.com.

Mobile phones and tablets are becoming more and more prevalent in today’s world and the mobile team here at Expedia has been hard at work making sure we offer great mobile experiences for our travelers. While many of you may be familiar with the ongoing investments we’re making in our Webby award-winning Expedia App, we’re also keenly focused on our mobile web experience.

Today, we’re pleased to announce the availability of a new, HTML5 Single-Page Application Mobile Web Flights experience, now available in 28 geographic markets. This is Expedia’s first Single-Page App (SPA) web experience for flights and we’re excited to share the new look and responsiveness that makes the mobile web flight path more immersive, and frankly, a lot more helpful and fun to use.

New details you may notice:

  • More responsive user experience: by using an improved platform, your search information is displayed more quickly, allowing you to effortlessly book a flight.
  • Easier to book a flight: we made the shopping experience easier by reducing the number of pages a customer visits from nine down to six.
  • Customers can now sign in to their account with an option to use Facebook Connect.
  • Increased stability: reduced the likeliness for outages by upgrading to new platform.

For our technophiles out there, Mobile Web Flights is Expedia’s first time building on a SPA platform. This technology reduces the need to communicate to the server for every page load, so it makes each session on Mobile Web Flights feel much faster and navigating between pages seems instant. In this case, the Mobile Web Flights SPA uses a single page load for the whole flight shopping session, which spans multiple pages. The savings in page load time improves the responsiveness and perceived speed. Mobile Web Flights uses a Backbone.js driven Model-View architecture, backed up with pre-compiled Handlebars template, and routing using HTML5 History API. 

We are pleased with the early shifts we’ve seen by implementing HTML5 and SPA on the Expedia Mobile Web Flights experience. Our goal is to take our learnings and extend our experiences with SPAs to new Mobile Web products in the future. Until then, check out our new mobile experience on your iOS or Android device by visiting www.expedia.com and clicking on Flights!