One of the largest offline players outside of America is fighting its way back into the online travel race. Congratulations to James Gaskell the Stella GM of Online Services at the the Australian based global offline travel giant Stella Travel on the re-launch this week of the central website for Harvey World Travel. The page looks good, has contextual links to drive a customer enquiry to a store and has an air engine with GDS and non-GDS carriers.
Even James will admit that this is just a start and there is a lot more to do (see his comments here in the Australian Travel Today where he says just that). James' boss and Stella CEO Keith Stanley announced at the recent TRAVELtech conference that he had set a target of 20% of turnover online in the next few years. So much more to do but the will is there.
Disclosure - it is well known that I did a bit of work helping Stella Travel put together their online travel strategy (if you didn't know you can check out my linkedin profile).
1 comment:
Geez, I hope HWT didn't pay too much for there web development and strategy advice.
A very unique approach to SEO on the hotel and tour pages - maybe google is now rewarding 'Untitled page' instead of something more relevant for a title.
Or perhaps paying for professional web development instead of using little Johny from next door's year 10 friend who got dreamweaver for Xmas to code the site might avoid empty drop down boxes for the 20% of users not using IE. (try and book a car from the octopus plugin using firefox).
As an ex-flighty its great to see HWT and other traditional agencies finally leap into the 1990's but I don't think the OTA's will be trembling in their boots just yet
Dave
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