National Holidays

National Holidays is a division of the Shearings Group, and are the UK’s leading specialist in short breaks and holidays by coach. 

We were appointed to help National Holidays drive online bookings and deliver a step change in the user experience of their website, across all devices.   My Role was to work closely with the National Holidays Marketing Team and third-party Booking System Team to provide a seamless user experience and technical integration of the system. Our approach began with running stakeholder discovery workshops. We applied our analysis model to inform the discovery workshop process and carried out a sector benchmarking exercise of the existing National Holidays website against a sample of competitors and travel industry leaders. We developed personas and analysed visitor journeys for high-volume website visitors, analysed site analytics and overlaid functional creative and content opportunities based on our best practice design ethos. In addition, we worked with National Holidays to develop visitor surveys for bookers and non-bookers. The resulting insight provided the background to the workshops and informed the functional specification and creative brief. My focus throughout the process was to provide a transparent presentation of the National Holidays offering to the visitor, providing them with simple methods to search and deliver accurate results with relevant alternatives through upsell and cross-sell. This work is complemented by an effective content strategy and site structure, for optimum organic search results. I worked closely with the client and the back-end booking platform developers to fine-tune the design and UX of the end-to-end user experience and process, reducing the number of stages required and improving the usability for mobile users. I led the the technical team in the provision of code, pages and templates to integrate directly with the back-end booking system as well as making sure the system was sound in relation to technical SEO. The redesign delivered on the multiple National Holidays objectives: bring their online brand up to date, improve the categorisation of holidays and offers, rationalise the booking process, and provide a seamless responsive user experience across devices.