A new travel platform Tangopapas.com has a marketing campaign out billing the service as a “new and reliable solution in the field of online travel agencies.” The service says it provides innovative features that make for the “best and most user-friendly” experience yet. Let’s see if the service stacks up to beta tester scrutiny.
Right out of the gate Tangopapas.com fails Google’s mobile speed test. I suspected it would given the fact the site loaded so slowly even on my desktop. 4G speed, according to Think With Google was poor at 3.2 seconds.
The detailed report from Google also suggest Tangopapas improve the UX design and make experiences more personalized.
When a service goes international and localizes, it’s vital to create texts that do not insult or confuse native speakers in those markets. You’d think a company advertising and doing sponsored posts on English language sites would think to have their websites in perfect English, wouldn’t you? I always check the supporting pages of sites and descriptions of rooms or tours etc. in order to find out how “deep” a company’s committment to customers is. The “About” on Tangopapas.com reads like a first grader wrote the texts. Let me show you.
“Tangopapas.com providing the best and user friendly application to our customers, with extensive tools specially for online travel business from hotels booking to flights reservation, we also provide custom web solutions and services. With over 4 years of experience Tangopapas.com have unquestionably won a reputation for being a trusted source, a reliable partner and an expert in the area of online travel business applications.”
I won’t give a grammar lesson here, anybody who’s listened to English in a movie soundtrack can reread this and find the problem.
In a random test of functionality, Tangopapas passed with normal user-friendly results. Users can filter hotels by categories like popularity, price, guest ratings, or star-rating. The site also fulfills the metasearch category by showing price differentiation via other OTAs. The site’s developers also did a nice job of creating comparative analysis in the system. Searching for a five-star hotel in Heraklion, for instance, the system automatically reveals thumbnail images alongside the recreated price matrix. It’s not a beautiful result aesthetically, but it’s a fast and efficient one.
Tangopapas.com users can also filter by such categories as the distance from the center of the city, property type, room options, policies, and so on. Overall, the meta-service is pretty good, but I have a problem with companies using terms like “best” and “most” when I drill down to find a mediocre user experience. In the case of Tangopapas.com digging for more info on a hotel leads to a dinosaur of a digital presentation. Look at the amazing Heraklion Five-Star Aquila Atlantis Hotel listing below. A stunning city center stay takes on the complexion of a 3-star roach motel in Ft. Lauderdale. (sorry)
Blurry images, cookie-cutter room presentation, and description, and a “nothing special” feel negate any possibility this is a “best of” service. Part of the problem may not be because of Tangopapas, but due to hotels giving other OTAs really crappy images. I think, but I am not quite sure, that Tangopapas.com is scraping the listings and images from sites like Agoda and others. Whatever the case, the developers are responsible for how Tangopapas.com visitors see things.
Moving on to other functionality, Tangopapas.com does a decent job of incorporating maps. Hotel guests who book through the service can get a good idea where everything in Heraklion is in relation to their stay. And price wise, the meta-search aspect of Tangopapas.com saves potential guests a good bit as compared to even a hotel’s native website.
Moving on to that “stunning” user experience you’d expect from Tangopapas.com’s paid posts in the media, and the texts and other deep aspects are dismally inadequate. The aforementioned five-star hotel in Heraklion has a description that barely even makes sense. There’s no telling how many conversions the company loses because of this, and hotels are not getting any favors either. Their description doesn’t even make sense.
“This 5-star hotel is 4.3 mi (7 km) from Palace of Knossos and 0.1 mi (0.2 km) from Museum of the Battle for Crete and National Resistance.Rooms Complimentary dial-up Internet access is available to keep you connected.Amenities Be sure to enjoy recreational amenities including an indoor pool and a seasonal outdoor pool.”
Again, it’s probably just scraped API data crammed together on the service’s pages by a very bad technology solution. It’s hard to tell in a cursory review like this. If readers like, just ask and I’ll have our programmers dive into the subject. It seems a mute point though, Tangopapas.com just needs a public relations or marketing guru to inform them about overselling and user expectations.
If you are looking for a good price for hotels, flights, cars, or for stuff at destinations you already know about, then Tangopapas.com is a serviceable source for comparing brands and offers. Beyond this, don’t expect anything near “the best and most user-friendly platform” marketed at GTP and other media outlets. The service is useful, but otherwise ordinary where experience and cutting edge tech are concerned.
