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Do styling A/B tests work in Travel & Hospitality?

Better than the Travel & Hospitality average, though not because the industry helps. Styling tests win 12% there against 8% for all change types in Travel & Hospitality. Across all industries styling tests run at 11%, so the category is carrying this, not the vertical.

It is the strongest change type we can currently measure in Travel & Hospitality.

Small winner set. Few of these tests cleared the bar. The 95% interval on that win rate runs 5% to 26%, so read the figure as directional.

The numbers

Won 12% No measurable change 70% Lost 18%
Travel & Hospitalityall industries
Tests analysed40 tests1,000+
Beat control12%11%
No measurable difference70%
Lost to control18%
Median lift when it won not reported

Median traffic per variant was 1603 visitors. Most ran on product pages (17), homepages (7), checkout pages (7).

Every change type we can measure in Travel & Hospitality

change typewin rate in Travel & Hospitalitytests
Styling (this page) 12%40 tests
Split URL 3%35 tests

What styling tests in Travel & Hospitality measured

A win rate only means as much as the thing being counted, so this is what these tests were actually optimising for.

measured outcomeshare of tests
Purchase / order complete31%
Booking / appointment23%
Reached a later funnel step14%
Lead / form submission9%

Outcomes below 5% of the set are not listed, so these do not sum to 100. Too few tests in this exact cut to break out on their own, so this is the whole industry. How the outcome was measured moves the win rate a lot — see the methodology.

Why this table is not a ranking

These rates are not like-for-like. How often a test wins depends partly on what it chose to measure: a goal that records a soft signal — a click, a scroll — clears the bar more often than one that records a purchase. Across this data, tests measured against a proxy goal win 13%, against 9% for tests measured against a business outcome.

Categories differ a lot in that mix — proxy goals account for anywhere from 2% to 41% of a category's tests.

Hold the metric fixed and the spread narrows sharply. Comparing only tests measured against a business outcome, the gap between the highest and lowest category falls from 9 points to 6 — at which point the intervals overlap and the categories are not statistically distinguishable.

So read the table as a description of what happened, not as a ranking of what works. If you want the comparison to mean something, compare categories that were measured the same way. The methodology page has the full breakdown.

The industry overview is at Travel & Hospitality benchmarks; rates across all industries are on the styling benchmark.

What counts as a styling test

Visual treatment shifts — spacing, weight, borders, colour, shadows — with the same content in the same order. Move the content and it is a layout test. Rewrite it and it is a copy test.

Control and variant wireframe for a styling A/B test
Control on the left, variant on the right. Only the changed element is highlighted.

Styling tests that won in Travel & Hospitality

  • It hid the control button group and replaced it with a styled card-like button group with hover and click effects, switching between desktop and mobile versions responsively.

    Lead capture page+48.3%

  • The booking button and calendar changed color, font weight, and size, and the icon background also changed, while the text stayed the same.

    +48.7%

  • Several existing page elements and sections were hidden with display:none, while the wording stayed the same.

    Product page+58.6%

  • The default hero banner was hidden and an alternate hero container was shown instead, with no text changes.

    Homepage+33%

Styling tests that did not

  • The page hid a nested section or div block inside the second section instead of showing it.

    Product pageNo significant difference

  • The product description text was shown on vertical and horizontal product cards before being hidden.

    Checkout pageNo significant difference

  • Two existing elements were hidden on the page, while the wording stayed the same.

    HomepageNo significant difference

These are individual tests, not rules. Each ran on one site, with one audience, against one page we are not showing you. They are picked to be illustrative rather than sampled at random, and a change that won here can lose on your page for reasons none of this captures. Read them as prompts for what to test, not as findings to copy.

Who ran these tests

This is every Mida account that ran a readable test — in-house marketers, founders, product teams, and agencies working on client sites. Nothing here is filtered by who ran the experiment or how experienced they are.

Low win rates are normal in experimentation, including at the top end. Microsoft's experimentation team, reporting on its own platform, found that only about one third of ideas improve the metric they were designed to improve — and that roughly another third actively hurt it. That is a dedicated experimentation organisation with research, prioritisation and review behind every test.

A mixed population like this one runs below that. The gap is roughly what disciplined practice buys you: ideas grounded in research rather than opinion, one variable at a time, and tests built so the result can actually be read.

A win is a variant that beat its control on that test's primary goal with a statistically significant result. Tests that never got enough traffic to say anything either way are excluded. The methodology has the full detail, including what these numbers cannot tell you.