Haven Holidays

Haven Holidays

digital case study

Managing a step change

Brief

In 2008, Nucleus was commissioned to re-design and develop haven.com for the 2009 season and subsequently to enhance and refresh the site with major updates through to 2012. A key consideration was to ease the core customer demographic profile towards Bs and C1s. The consistent digital and business objectives were to improve the customer experience, enhance the user journey and increase conversion rates.

The priority KPIs were:

- grow online sales as a percentage of total sales
- increase average order values online
- improve conversions

Solution

For 2009, Nucleus defined a new aesthetic to appeal to the adjusted target audience without alienating existing customers. This included the use of larger and more compelling images, cleaner graphics and the use of AJAX technologies while integrating Haven Holidays’ extensive content assets in an innovative and interactive user experience.

The design was significantly refreshed in 2011 with an updated look and feel consistent with Haven’s offline collateral, a re-design of key components and the integration of a number of enhancements driven by detailed usability findings, user feedback and analysis of analytics data.

The 2011 innovations included further enhancement of the extensive Haven multimedia assets to showcase the substantial on-park investments, improved navigation to create an easier user experience and encourage use of the new interactive online research tools; such as Places to Visit, Holiday Finder, Accommodation Tour and Show Me Where. These innovative new features are unique to Haven.com and were developed to improve visitor conversion and engagement. Customers engaging with these new interactive search tools showed an improvement over average conversion of +54%.

A mobile specific website was developed and launched in early 2012. The mobile website was developed in the same content management system as the main site (Tridion) allowing considerable management efficiencies.

Results

The Haven digital channel achieved record results each year with online sales more than doubling from 2009-2012. Digital is now the largest and most important sales channel for Haven Holidays. In 2012, haven.com achieved the No.1 spot in the respected eDigital Research Travel Benchmark Survey and was voted the Best Tour Operator website in both the Travolution and Travelmole Awards.