Cosmos Holidays | Website Design

Traditionally, Cosmos sold package holidays through high street travel agencies and printed brochures. Cosmos approached Digital Marmalade to help re-position the company online, away from more traditional sales avenues to its web services and partner sites. To increase the conversion rate and boost sales a complete overhaul of Cosmos’ digital strategy was needed.

The Solution

The project began with an intensive planning phase. In order to fully understand Cosmos’ exact business needs, we ran internal departmental workshops, met with its existing technology partners and conducted a thorough evaluation of the online travel industry.

Once this was completed we mapped out a phased digital strategy, and created a ‘Functional Specification’ document. We worked up wireframes of the proposed site structure and developed design options which were tested for usability and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). With designs signed off, and content agreed, work on building the site began.

Five months later, the new Cosmos Holidays website went live. Integrated with Cosmos’ existing booking engine, we built the site on a new Content Management System with ‘cleansed’ data. The site features SEO friendly destination guides and a greatly improved booking path. Since ‘go live’ we’ve added ‘Villas’, ‘Cruises’, ‘Safaris’, ‘Florida’ and ‘Lapland’ sections – along with interactive maps and hotel videos. Marketing tools have also been created to maximise commercial messaging.

This is an ongoing partnership - the next phase of the strategy is to add ‘Dynamic Packaging’ giving customers the ability to select individual components of their holiday directly. This will be followed by adding social networking functions to the site allowing customers to directly review hotels and holidays.

The aim of this project was to expand the Cosmos online holiday portfolio and to strengthen its online position. In January 2008 the site topped £1,000,000 in sales PER WEEK, for every week of the month. That is a 250% increase on the same period of the previous year. Web traffic numbers have dramatically increased, too – largely thanks to improved SEO, increased paid search campaigns, a more user friendly, visually pleasing website, better products, tighter sales margins, and targeted email campaigns.

www.cosmos-holidays.co.uk