CUSTOMER STORYMobile search hits the jackpot: How Vegas.com boosted conversions.

How a leading travel site serving 2.3 million monthly users transformed its mobile experience and saw conversions soar by 33%.

“For Vegas one of the challenges we have is that…it’s a fun town and sometimes you’re not at your spelling best.”

— Paul Mello, Director of Product Management, Vegas.com

The high stakes of mobile experience

Vegas.com offers the best of Las Vegas’s hotels, attractions, entertainment, and nightlife from a single online interface. As a publicly-owned travel agency focused on the direct-to-consumer market for Las Vegas tourism, the site helps millions of visitors create customized itineraries for their perfect Sin City experience.

With 2.3 million users every month and half of them accessing the site via mobile devices, the quality of the mobile experience has become critical to the company’s success. Yet until recently, the mobile version of Vegas.com was missing a crucial component: full-featured search.

When the house advantage works against you

Without proper search functionality, mobile users were forced to take a linear and time-consuming path to book their Vegas experiences. The process was particularly frustrating for users who knew exactly what they wanted or were already in Las Vegas trying to make quick decisions about shows or attractions.

“We have a hyper-focus on performance,” said Paul Mello, Director of Special Projects at Vegas.com, recognizing that in the competitive travel booking space, even seconds of delay can drive potential customers to competitors.

The existing mobile experience required users to input their travel dates and then navigate through multiple categories and lists to find specific attractions or shows. For spontaneous in-market users or those with specific entertainment in mind, this cumbersome process was causing frustration and lost sales.

Placing a new bet on search

Vegas.com decided to transform its mobile experience by implementing Lucidworks to create a fast, relevant, and user-friendly mobile search experience.

“Lucidworks gave us a complete platform for delivering fast, scalable search, with many of the capabilities we needed out-of-the-box, ready to use.” — Paul Mello, Director of Product Management, Vegas.com

The implementation focused on three key capabilities:

1. Full-text search

The most important addition was full-text search functionality that allowed users who knew exactly what they wanted to quickly find it and enter the purchase flow. This eliminated the previously time-intensive booking path and made the experience much more efficient, especially for mobile users making spontaneous decisions.

2. Query pipelines for timely relevance

Another critical feature was query pipelines, which allowed the Vegas.com team to dynamically boost particular products based on seasonality or current trends. For example, if a performer announces a Las Vegas show today, the system can immediately prioritize it in search results, even if the event is months away.

These pipelines also powered the auto-suggest feature and enabled rules for boosting particular results, creating a more intelligent and responsive search experience.

3. Personalization through signals

Vegas.com implemented signal capture to track user behavior across the site, including which links users clicked, what queries they submitted, and how long they spent on each page. This data helped continuously fine-tune the search experience, improving relevancy and enabling personalized recommendations.

The system’s flexibility was particularly valuable given the unique challenges of Las Vegas search. As Mello humorously noted, “For Vegas one of the challenges we have is that…it’s a fun town and sometimes you’re not at your spelling best.” The new search system could accommodate these realities with features like spell checking and query understanding.

Testing the odds

To validate their investment, the Vegas.com team conducted A/B testing of the new mobile search interface. Some users were shown the new search experience while others continued to see the existing design without search functionality.

The results were definitive: users who had access to the new search feature converted at significantly higher rates than those using the conventional interface. Even though only 8% of mobile users took advantage of search, they accounted for 12-15% of the site’s overall conversions—demonstrating the outsized impact of effective search on revenue.

Hitting the jackpot with results

The implementation of Lucidworks’ AI-powered search delivered impressive results across key performance metrics:

• Engagement soared: Page views and user engagement increased by 63%
• Fewer departures: Bounce rates for the mobile site dropped by 8%
• More bookings: Conversion rates from search to reservation or ticket purchase increased by 33%

“Lucidworks helped us create a relevant, responsive, mobile search experience that reduced friction and increased conversions.” — Paul Mello, Director of Product Management, Vegas.com

The success was so substantial that Vegas.com subsequently built a new desktop search experience using Lucidworks as well, replacing their existing search appliance with the more efficient and powerful solution.

The house always wins (when search works)

For Vegas.com, implementing effective search wasn’t just about adding a feature—it was about fundamentally transforming how users interact with their service. By providing a fast, intelligent search experience that accommodates the realities of travel planning (including those late-night, perhaps not “spelling best” moments), Vegas.com has significantly improved its ability to connect users with the Las Vegas experiences they’re seeking.

With half of their 2.3 million monthly users accessing the site via mobile devices, the improved search experience has positioned Vegas.com to better serve spontaneous, in-market travelers as well as those planning ahead. By removing friction from the booking process and providing more relevant results, the company has created a winning experience for both users and their bottom line.

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By implementing intelligent search optimized for mobile users, Vegas.com transformed the booking experience for its 2.3 million monthly visitors, decreasing bounce rates by 8% and increasing conversions by 33%—proving that in the high-stakes world of online travel booking, fast and relevant search is a sure bet.