Customer Key Points:

Customer wants the ability to sell holidays online. Currently, there is not live availability for flights and accommodation so a mixture of static dBase files and some xml feeds will be used. The customer will pre-book a holiday using a secure form. Personal and payment information will be noted but not charged for at this step.

There will be a single holiday search page rather than multiple holiday search pages as there are currently. The customer will require the ability to specify/limit the destinations and resorts they wish to offer online.

The customer requires the ability for selected staff to promote offers to the website as needed rather than waiting for IT staff or a 3rd Party to promote updates.

All holiday requests from website and call centre to be stored in an enquiry module. Clients needs ability to create various status fields for these enquiries with a follow through process to identify what stage an enquiry has reached and who is currently responsible for it. This will require a staff module to identify employees, managers and security rights to add/edit/delete enquiry status fields and to change the status of an enquiry.

Agency wants to revamp look and feel of website to bring up to date. Small budget available to come up with some concept ideas. They like the expedia look/feel and functionality.

Some color options would be red/white/blue, orange/green but care needs to be taken regarding color blindness and use of web safe colors. It may be possible to have a link for color blind people to click on and select a color scheme that they can see better. The site could then use that color scheme throughout their session (css?).

Step 1. Identify suitable design concepts.
Step 2. Identify color scheme.

Below is a suggested home page layout from Calibre.

By removing the standard navigation menu from the left portion of the browser, more space is available for promoting offers on the home page and for displaying results. The main navigation can remain below the header as the product areas are relatively static and can be identified from the start.

The adverts would be dynamic and the Agency would need the ability to specify what is displayed in each advert if so desired. If nothing set by the agency then the system would randomly select a destination. This would work where the agency has set the criteria for a particular advert but the advert expires. The system would then display a current offer rather than an out of date offer.

After searching for a holiday, the system could ask for a minimum amount of information such as Name, Email, Telephone. This information will be used to email marketing and also for when they make a booking. Identify current industry practices for client profiling and customer accounts.

A booking will be made after carrying out a search. The customer will be given the option to pre-book and they will complete an online booking form (secure). This information will then be received by the agency automatically into the Intranet. An email warning could be sent to a desired email address or user group. The request will also appear in the Intranet system as an unprocessed request status.

The agency will then manually process the booking and confirm back to the customer.

Click here for data sources.

It is our opinion that some form of cost per click campaign is required. Leading the way currently is Google which is reported to have around 73% of the marketplace according to Barrett Consultancy.

A Google strategy and budget would therefore be recommended.

WWP offer option to feature holidays on their matrix. This option would require a commission to be paid to WWP for any bookings through their system. This option is suitable as their system is already geared up for high rankings in search engines. Barrett Consultancy state they have not done any Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for the last 3 years.

exciteFX will include some SEO and CPM as a standalone option as they recommend that a separate budget be allocated for CPM and CPC. They have the ability target specific areas so if there was a special golfing package for the Algarve, they can specifically target Golf Websites. They recommend that a CPM campaign run in conjunction with SEO and they will automatically have SEO features built into any web pages that they design.