Digitising a travel agency, from shop window to back office
A travel agency that wants to sell online almost always starts by rebuilding its website. It is the most expensive mistake in the sector, because the site is only the shop window and the problem sits behind it.
On this account the work covered the whole chain: rebuilding the public site and the back office, opening an online shop with payment, building a quote request management tool, and a feed that fills the screens in the physical branches from the same source.
The account followed. Successive annual recommendations go from a few thousand euros in the first year to a six-figure budget in the fourth, a seventeenfold increase in three years. A client does not raise a budget like that for communications. They raise it when the tool starts earning.
A travel agency in an island market, with several physical branches, a catalogue of destinations and a customer base still largely booking at the counter. Its website worked as a brochure. Enquiries arrived by phone, by email and at the counter, and each was handled its own way. The catalogue on display in the window and on the branch screens had no connection to what was online.
Digitising a service business is not putting your catalogue on the web. It is accepting that the internal process changes. A quote request arriving through a form has to land somewhere, be assigned to someone, tracked, chased and closed. Until that somewhere exists, the form only moves the mess around. Add online payment in a market where cards are not the reflex, and in-store screens, which do not forgive stale content.
1 · Week one: listen and decide.
On site. Understand what the cooperative does, what its buyers and partners need to believe, and what the members are proud of. Positioning written and validated in the room, not by email.
2 · Week two: build the identity.
Visual identity designed against the positioning: name system, marks, colours, typography, and rules simple enough to be applied without a design team. Every choice tested against one question: does this raise institutional trust?
3 · Week three: ship the assets.
The working kit the cooperative actually needed: documents, signage, presentation materials, templates. Delivered with a short guide and a working session so the members could produce their own materials next month.
4 · Spend where perception changes.
The budget went into the few physical touchpoints partners actually see. Nothing was spent on deliverables that flatter the consultant.
2012 to 2015 account, full chain.
- Public site and back office rebuild handled as a single project
- Dedicated online shop opened, with online payment, on a chosen part of the offer
- Quote request management tool built, with owner, status and chase
- Feed filling the in-store screens from the same content source as the site
- Account budget multiplied seventeenfold in three years, from a few thousand euros to a six-figure annual recommendation
- Community recruitment at 0.27 euro per follower over the period
A budget multiplied seventeenfold in three years does not reward a campaign, it rewards a tool that changed how people work. A service business is digitised through its internal process, not through its home page. If your site is rebuilt but enquiries still land in a shared inbox, you have bought a shop window.
Is it your site that was rebuilt, or your process?
The first call30 minutes. We talk about your traction and what is blocking it. You leave with 2 or 3 moves you can act on. No pitch.