Putting conversion strategy at the heart of design & build.

Holiday Vacations

Offering group bus, rail, and boat tours to destinations around the world, Holiday Vacations is a travel company whose brand captures the friendly easy-to-work-with experience you would expect from a company based in the Midwest.

The Challenge

What makes Holiday Vacations special is the relationships they’ve formed with local media companies that enable guests to travel with familiar personalities. Their biggest challenge was to upgrade their reservation system so customers could book online rather than having to call and speak to a booking agent. The goal was to reduce an “all hands on deck” rush at the peak of booking season by moving a significant portion of the booking burden online.

Strategic Approach

The site’s strategic vision was to create a conversion path that reflects the Holiday Vacations brand, offering users a friendly experience as if they are working with a trusted guide. To achieve this, we built a new technology platform that seamlessly integrates first- and third-party systems to support travelers at every stage.
Tour detail pages sell each trip by enabling guests to imagine themselves inside the tour experience, getting them excited about the possibilities ahead.
A familiar, guided experience walks guests through conversion from learning about a tour to a reservation booking flow that reduces friction and streamlines the checkout process.
The process of applying travel credits towards a booking has been reduced from four clicks to one.
Additional entry points into key differentiating tours with local media stars are amplified on the homepage and within search.

User Experience

By leveraging common best practice UX patterns, the brand is legitimized as a trusted booking company that is on the side of the guest.
While introducing online reservations we also took the opportunity to modernize the entire user experience by enabling users to scan for the high-level basics like the itinerary, dates, and cost while also digging deeper into the rich details that matter
A powerful search allows guests to quickly narrow down the many trip options to what they seek using multiple filtering and sorting options.
A hand-holding approach provides familiar patterns and cues for an older audience while repeating CTAs at critical points.

Design

The resulting design advances an updated Holiday Vacations brand into a more modern, digital world. It’s intended to tap into the visual experience of traveling.

Tours are sold with a high volume of immersive ambient video and imagery. White space is leveraged to create clear, easily scannable pages. Given the needs of the target audience, special attention was paid to compliance with accessibility guidelines resulting in high-contrast content and CTAs with large touch targets.

Implementation

IfThen developed a brand new technology platform that integrates a variety of first and third-party systems together to help Holiday Vacations service the needs of their travelers from end to end.

Through a service-oriented architecture and a microservices layer known as Tour Services, we integrated HV’s commerce engine - powered by Peak15 - with a variety of systems, including a new Drupal content management system.  

Commerce data from Peak15 and marketing content from Drupal are presented seamlessly to travelers. A robust search experience that leverages Elastic Search allows travelers to easily find the content they need to make their booking decisions.

The new reservation flow also allows travelers to create and customize their bookings online.  The transaction processing capabilities enabled through Tour Services has allowed HV to fully automate the booking experience, including collecting payment safely and securely and ensuring that all reservation data makes its way into Peak15 efficiently.

We’ve also designed and built the HV system for scaling and extensibility.  We’ve developed a library of headless UI components using prevailing front-end technologies such as Next.js (React, Node) - all powered by content from Drupal via its JSON:API.

And of course, the platform is built for resiliency with modern approaches to cache management and invalidation, asset optimization, containerization, and instrumentation.

Outcomes

Since the launch of the new Holiday Vacations website, online bookings have increased a staggering 150+% with 57% of these online bookings coming from travelers new to the brand.

Deliverables 

  1. Systems Design
  2. Data & Content Modeling
  3. Headless CMS Implementation
  4. Front- and Back-End Development
  5. Microservices Development
  6. Infrastructure Provisioning & Configuration
About the Project
  • Client Holiday Vacations
  • Founded 1973
  • Sector Travel and leisure
  • Employees ~100
Services
Engagement Leads

Tech Stack 

  • NextJS Drupal (Headless CMS)
  • Django/Python (Microservices)
  • Third-party integrations (Elastic Search, Peak15, HubSpot, Trip Traka)

Visit the Website
www.holidayvacations.com