Win report: How trust signals turned suspicion into 16% more signups

Published: August 2025

Win Reports help you grow your business by showing our methodology at work. Each Win Report showcases a real-world test, sharing the research, insights, and techniques that led to the win.

In the next three minutes, we’ll show you how addressing two key objections enabled us to increase signups by 16% for Party Hard Travel.

A side-by-side comparison of two website homepage designs for Party Hard travel packages. The control version shows a hero banner with the text ‘Final Release Packages Now Live.’ The variation adds a beige trust bar above the hero banner, highlighting social proof, low deposit pricing, and Trustpilot ratings.

Born from a disappointing Ayia Napa trip, Party Hard Travel now sends over 40,000 partygoers a year to Ibiza, Zante, and beyond, partnering with brands like Love Island and MTV. It is rated Excellent on Trustpilot.

The initial goal of the website is to sign visitors up for a free account, from which they can book the Members Only Release Packages.

Research: What are you afraid of?

If you’ve read our article on DiPS (Diagnose → Problem → Solution), you’ll know that our research zeros in on specific issues that reduce a website’s conversion. As we say in the article:

Conversion solutions are highly targeted; the problems are like locks—the solutions like keys.

One of the most valuable “lock-finding” techniques is to talk to non-converting visitors to understand why they didn’t “buy.” For example, when we asked Party Hard Travel’s non-converters open questions about their biggest booking fear or concern, two factors tied for first place.

Open questions allow the participants to answer in their own words, providing both the issues and the language used to express them, which can be pure gold when creating content for your visitors.

A horizontal bar chart showing customer survey results about booking concerns. The top two concerns are Scam or fraud concerns, and Cost concerns, both at 11%. Other concerns, shown in grey, rank lower. — The two most pressing fears were ‘Scam’ and ‘Cost’ concerns.

While cost is almost always a primary objection for paid products and services, here the barrier wasn’t about value—it was about timing. Many young visitors were trying to coordinate bookings for an entire group of friends, and assumed that they needed everyone’s money ready at once. That often wasn’t possible until payday. As one non-converter explained:

“There are too many people in my group to organise, and I can’t get all of our money together to book as we’re waiting for payday.”

This subtle difference—cash flow and coordination rather than affordability—was a critical insight. It highlighted the need to show that customers didn’t have to pay the full amount upfront.

The other primary objection, that Party Hard Travel might be a scam, comes down to a lack of trust. When mentioning their biggest fears, non-converters said things like:

“The legitimacy of the business. I have never heard of it before and got a bit suspicious due to the low prices.”

“Could be a scam.”

“Knowing you was 100% legit.”

“If it was trustworthy.”

“Worried it was a scam.”

“Unsure whether it was real or not.”

Most visitors were young, booking holidays online for the first time, and especially wary of being tricked. The low prices, which should have been an attractive selling point, ironically reinforced the suspicion: “too good to be true.”

In fact, the website already contained “keys” that would unlock these objections, but not enough visitors were seeing them. To test whether we could improve their visibility, we turned to a tried and tested pattern from our Wins Database.

The original page (or control)

Here’s the header of the original desktop site:

A website homepage for Party Hard showing a hero banner with bold text ‘Final Release Packages Now Live’ over a background photo of people partying in a club. — The Control. The menu, logo, and Book Now button sit at the top of the page.

The tested page (or variation)

For the variation, we added a benefits bar to the top of every desktop page on the website:

A website homepage for Party Hard showing the same hero banner, but with an added beige trust bar at the top. The trust bar emphasizes 40,000 bookings per year, a £30 reservation deposit, and a 4.8-star Trustpilot rating. — The Variation: The USP bar above the menu highlights social proof and the low reservation price.

The benefits bar combined clear trust signals with cost-related messaging:

40,000 OF YOU BOOK WITH US EVERY YEAR
Save over 50% vs booking events separately
ONLY £30 TO RESERVE YOUR PACKAGE
Lock in today, pay the rest later
RATED ‘EXCELLENT’ ON TRUSTPILOT
4.8 stars (94% 5-star reviews)

As you can see, the first message addresses trust and affordability, the second highlights the low reservation fee, and the third adds a further trust signal (from a verifiable source).

Result: Signups increased by 16%

During the test, we observed a 16% increase in signups for Party Hard Travel. This result confirms the value of these messages for testing elsewhere in the marketing funnel. As we say on our Methodology page, it’s important to:

… explore how you can implement the insights from your winning experiments in other parts of your marketing funnel.

What next?

As usual, we added the test to our proprietary Wins Database, then looked for ways to apply its lessons to other parts of Party Hard Travel’s business and then to other clients.

If you want us to grow your profits—quickly and efficiently—check if you qualify for a free one-on-one strategy session with one of our CRO consultants.

We’ll only work with you if we believe we can get amazing results together. Our success has come entirely from positive word of mouth, and we plan to keep it that way.

Thanks to Party Hard Travel for letting us share these insights (and for being such a fun team to work with).

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