Case Study: A New Website for Yankee Trails World Travel Provides 24/7 Online Service for Customers
Executive Summary:
Yankee Trails is a premiere provider in the travel industry offering regional, national and worldwide options. Since 1957, the company has been providing transportation to New York State's Capital Region. They’ve grown from a two motor coach operation to one of the largest tour and charter motor carriers in the Northeast. With the addition of a full-service travel agency, Yankee Trails World Travel has expanded to provide an endless array of travel opportunities and customized vacation packages.
Needs Assessment:
Yankee Trails wanted a dynamic online channel to market their large array of travel offerings and to offer their customers a 24/7 information and reservation service. They wanted to provide visitors to the website the ability to plan, purchase and pay for an online tour or trip reservation with the ability to customize the various aspects of the tour to their own specifications. Potential clients also needed to be able to design their own travel itinerary and request a customized quote online. Most importantly, these functions had to be easy to use and presented in an intuitive manner.
Yankee Trails wanted to give clients the ability to purchase YT gift certificates online and to register to become a YT Preferred Customer. The website needed to allow for online credit card purchase with the ability for discount coupon handling.
Design:
Mercury created a design for the Yankee Trails website that has the look and feel of an exciting online travel brochure. The website includes a lot of wonderful photography that conveys the excitement and allure of travel and underscores the welcoming, friendly nature of the YT staff. Mercury’s image rich design possesses the distinct and compelling look that Yankee Trails wanted. It appeals equally to everyone in their very wide ranging customer base.
Mercury’s creative design framework is flexible enough for Yankee Trails to expand and maximize marketing opportunities over the next several years.
Functionality:
Mercury designed and built an online Tours Catalog in which a visitor can click on a tour and receive all the pertinent information regarding that tour. After selecting a tour and inputting the requested data including user selected choices, the visitor can proceed to the shopping cart.
Mercury built a custom shopping cart for Yankee Trails to accommodate the specific properties of the online reservation system and Yankee Trails’ Gift Certificate program with provision for discount coupon handling. Mercury provided a payment gateway for the website to allow for purchase completion online.
Other visitor benefits that Mercury developed for the new YT website include the capability to request a quote, and for customer registration. Mercury added a site search tool for the Yankee Trails website that allows visitors to quickly and easily find and go to any area or page of the website.
As exciting and functional as the user side of the Yankee Trails website is, the tools which Mercury created for the administrative functions of the site are equally impressive. Mercury built an intuitive, customized Content Management System in order to streamline the process of making site updates and reduce reliance on outside sources. In fact, Mercury created an array of administrative tools to allow Yankee Trails to manage almost every aspect of their website. The list includes administrative tools to manage, among others, tours and tour categories, users, the site’s photo gallery, order history, and statistics, and the ability to create a printable flier and/or itinerary. Many of these tools provide multiple priority options for display and reporting.