HANDPICKED TOURS, CRUISES, BREAKS & HOLIDAYS
Integrated into the Mail Online site and accessing its 5.7 million unique daily visitors the Mail Travel offering provides handpicked UK & worldwide holidays. Under the slogan “The first place to visit”, www.mailtravel.co.uk offers customers a one-stop shop for the inspiration, research and purchase phases of the holiday-booking process.
The challenge
The Mail Travel team had a history of creating rich editorial content and offering a robust new sales distribution channel to their suppliers. The challenge set for Artirix was one of building an integrated product and editorial content experience for users, think a full eCommerce solution mixed with useful article content assisting users find their perfect holiday.
All of this would require a backend solution capable of supporting:
- Editorial control of 1,000s of searchable articles
- CMS control of key content sections
- e.g. homepage, category and destination pages
- Index of 500 searchable catalog products
- Product feeds multiple suppliers
Plus a responsive UI with a fast time to title, time to start render and time to fully interact for client side users, capable of supporting:
- An average of 2,000 – 5,000 visitors per hour with ability to handle 5,000 concurrent users at any one time.
The result
The site was built on a scalable platform designed to deliver powerful ecommerce functionality, while meeting increased customer demand for a simple, easy-to-navigate travel site. Built on top of the Ruby on Rails web framework and styled using Twitter Bootstrap, including features for implementation of 'reactive design', content management from BrowserCMS (integrated into the Artirix Admin UI) and facetted search and results filtering built on top of Elasticsearch API's.
According to the metrics following the re-launch in September 2014, in addition to the increase in unique visitors, key improvements made to the site have increased onsite conversion by 69% whilst the revenue generated per visitor has increased by 86%, says the Mail.
“We are delighted to see that the re-launch of www.mailtravel.co.uk has already built on the exceptional success of the previous website and to see such a significant improvement across the key performance metrics so soon after launch is very promising. We are now looking forward to working with new travel partners in order to offer even more choice to Mail customers.”
Year: 2014
Services
- Software Development
- Data + Content Search
- UI Design + Build
- Support + Maintenance