2009 - Monarch Holidays
Monarch Travel Portal enters Beta testing stage

Following on from our last update on this project, back in February, we have now developed the Monarch Travel portal to the beta testing stage.

This project started off as an exercise in combining Cosmos’s holiday portfolio and somewhere2stay’s accommodation portfolio with Monarch Airline’s flight product to produce a Monarch Travel Portal.

The reasoning behind the strategy is to:

• Maximize advertising spend and build brand awareness by driving traffic to one website, instead of spreading costs across three specialist brands.
• Improve the website's search engine optimization, by structuring all products in a clear and logical way and merging the rich content into one site.
• Capitalize on the improved cross product selling opportunities, for example by up selling a flight to include hotels and car hire
• Streamline IT costs and time by ‘upgrading’ the technology into one uniform development platform for all the sites.

After going through a thorough planning phase and developing wireframes and fresh designs, we started phase 1 of the build stage.

We were effectively starting from scratch.  The site is built ensuring that it is fully search engine optimized and as such there is research content across the website that is specific to flights, holidays and hotels across all destinations and resorts.  The user can drill down the research paths to Hotels in Alcudia, Majorca for example and will be presented with Flight only prices and holiday prices allowing for an easy cross sell.

High on the priority list when we set about re-working the website was ensuring that many of the previous manual processes were automated.  All prices and deals automatically update, cross checking inventory on the fly, to ensure that the best deals are always on offer.  This has greatly reduced the IT and commercial team’s maintenance time and as a result reduced costs.  The site now features lots of useful content to aid the user’s buying decision.  It’s full of interactive maps, weather charts, engaging video, beautiful photography, user reviews and content around sights and activities for all the destinations.

We’ve completely simplified the navigation, allowing users to select flights, holidays, hotels and car hire on the top level and more specific product on the secondary level (exotic holidays, villa holidays, safaris, tours and cruises for example).

A huge database of frequently asked questions and answers have been added and categorized, making it very easy for the user to find a whole host of information about their holiday from insurance policies to vaccinations needed.  This is also available in Spanish and Portuguese languages.

The search panel has also been greatly improved.  It’s now a fully dynamic search panel allowing the user to select the type of main product (flights, holidays, hotels) they are after.  Once selected the search panel automatically reconfigures itself to display more specific fields corresponding to the selection.  For example if the user selects holidays, all the holiday types will appear, if they then select villa holidays for example, then the destination drop downs also display only the villa holiday destinations, if they then select a departure date, only the dates that fly to the particular destination will be displayed.  This should ensure that the user is fully in control of the website and that they find the perfect flight, holiday or hotel easily.

The look and feel of the website is completely in line with Monarch’s advertising campaigns bringing the below the line activity together with the above the line.  Another box ticked. 

At this stage the website has gone into Beta testing.  This means it’s available in the public domain and bookings can be made, but it’s hidden from the search engines.  The reason for this is so it can be fully tested by a selection of the public so the development team can iron out any bugs.  The site is also being stress tested to ensure the servers have enough power to service a lot of concurrent users.

While this testing is going on Digital Marmalade are fixing bugs and cross browser issues as well as running through the website to ensure that all the pages look good when they are printed out.

Hopefully in a few weeks the site will go live.  We’ll let you know when it does.

Read more in our Monarch Holidays Web Design Case Study