When Thomas Cook Group decided to launch a new adventure holidays brand called Neilson Adventures, building upon the prestige of their famous activity brand Neilson, they came to VSI-thinking to deliver a truly innovative site.
VSI-thinking developed and maintain the existing Neilson site, and the new Neilson Adventures site gave us room to really show what we could do using some of the latest technologies available.
One important aspect of an adventure holiday company, considering a large number of travellers will be alone or in small groups, is a sense of community - allowing people to meet and get to know each other before they venture in to the jungle together!
To aid this, VSI-thinking added a forum, with moderator options available so Neilson Adventures staff can easily edit or delete posts, open and close rooms, and ban or accept users. We also added a reviews section, allowing users to give an honest opinion of their holiday - useful not only for other users but also for Neilson Adventures to get feedback. Again, these come with approval tools to prevent malicious reviews.
There's also a wishlist that users can add trips to - either for easy bookmarking or maybe to leave a hint for a loved one to purchase it!
To aid users in selecting trips, VSI-thinking delivered a number of great features such as a quick and user-friendly trip image gallery, related products (so a user can see trips similar to their selection) and a trips top ten board on the homepage. All of these are supported by easy-to-use back end tools, that allow Neilson Adventures to quickly and efficiently update their offering.
Also, a clickable map that allows for selection of a region was developed to aid geographical selection of trips, and the helpful search features that VSI-thinking implemented allow adventures to be searched for by almost any parameter - price, country/region, number of people travelling, adventure type and whether or not it's family friendly.
The site of course includes the user-friendly VSI-thinking Content Management System (CMS). This is allows for the easy editing of pages using a Word-style interface, meaning even the most novice computer users can be adding or updating pages in minutes, and Neilson Adventures have really made the most of it!
Neilson Adventures being a new brand also needed to consider marketing. That's where VSI-thinking's great tools come in handy, with users being able to request brochures, e-newsletters and of course join the community. Each of these actions stores the user's contact information in the database, allowing for direct marketing if the user has chosen to allow it.
Another important aspect for a new site is of course search engine optimisation (SEO). A poor Google page rank is just not acceptable for such a big travel group. With this in mind, the new site has been optimised by VSI-thinking to really perform well in search engines (beaten only to the Neilson Adventures phrase in Google by the Neilson site itself, also developed by us!), with strategies such as keyword-heavy pages, SEO-friendly searches and lots of unique user-generated content.
Finally, we added a web services module, that enables Thomas Cook to request a feed from the site - allowing for seamless integration into their booking journey. It's a great example of how web services can be used to allow co-operation between sites, and shows VSI-thinking's ability to remain at the forefront of technology.
The new site went live in the last few weeks, and is already generating a lot of interest. If you'd like to see all these great features in action, take a look at Neilson Adventures!