The Brief
Monarch, Cosmos, and somewhere2stay are all part of the same travel group. They specialise in selling flights, holidays and holiday accommodation respectively. Each site is built on varying technologies, generates its own traffic, and is driven by a separate Content Management System and booking engine. The strategy was to bring all of the sites onto one platform, under the Monarch brand - resulting in more streamlined technology, aggregated web traffic and SEO equity, focused marketing spend and integrated cross-selling opportunities.
The Solution
A phased approach was agreed. Firstly to 'skin' the somewhere2stay site as Monarch Hotels, and the Cosmos site as Monarch Holidays. This would allow customers to quickly get used to the idea of booking holidays and accommodation through the Monarch brand, and allow Monarch to start a huge marketing campaign to bring in new customers. Working closely with the team at Monarch, we created new logos, graphics, and a design for the website. Once these were signed off, new style sheets were applied. Although the new Monarch Hotels site looks completely different to the s2s site, all of the changes are completely cosmetic - the original layout was kept. After this was completed, the more complex task of turning the Cosmos Holidays site into Monarch Holidays was undertaken. Not only have we restyled the site, we’ve also upgraded the HTML and CSS files to make them more efficient and accessible.
Both of these jobs were completed in record speed – just nine weeks in total!
The second stage of the project is to effectively rebuild the Monarch website, positioning it as a true travel portal rather then separate sites that look similar. This took us back to the drawing board. Wireframes showing how the site would work were produced and a development framework, based on .Net technology, was devised. Once the structure and approach were signed off, we converted the wireframes into designs, then produced the HTML and graphics. We worked alongside Monarch's IT team to build the website and functionality. We're currently in this process.
The next stage is to reskin copies of the Monarch portal as Cosmos, Avro and Somewhere2stay. These will become agent only websites and will share the same underlying technology, thus reducing the IT mainenance costs. Having worked with Cosmos and Monarch for three years, this project gives us the opportunity to produce what we think will be the best travel portal on the web. We'll keep you posted as of to when we'll be going live.
