For the world's largest student travel organisation, enriching the travel experience by providing convenient access to a multitude of products, services and advice is a prime requirement its Web properties. With 16 different web sites around the world, STA Travel wanted to find a cost-effective way of ensuring a consistent, high quality global presence. The company has launched a central platform, designed by IBM and powered by RedDot Solutions' content management system, from which it can roll-out top-class functionality around the world. Feedback shows that potential customers appreciate the new online features. The solution is improving online sales conversion rates and meeting revenue targets.

About

STA Travel is the world's largest student travel organisation with around six million customers in over 90 countries and more than 2000 staff worldwide. A firm believer in giving its customers convenient access to products, services and advice through a mix of channels, the company has more than 350 retail branches in addition to its call centres and 16 localised web sites.

Challenge

Over 80 per cent of customers begin their relationship with STA Travel online, so its web sites are crucial to the business. "Typical STA Travel customers are looking to enrich their travel experiences through online access to relevant products, services and advice at anytime, from anywhere in the world, " says Peter Liney, Chief Operating Officer at STA Travel. "By providing innovative new facilities such as access to user generated travel logs and personal recommendations, we can greatly increase the appeal of our sites."

With autonomously run web sites in 16 countries however, STA Travel was not presenting a consistent corporate image or online experience to its customers. Functionality differed from site to site and it was expensive trying to provide the leading-edge facilities that appeal to a young, technology literate audience at each location. It was also difficult to control the content of individual sites and keep information current - in the travel industry, special deals and flight availability change daily, for example.

Certain that the online channel would be critical to the success of STA Travel for the foreseeable future, the company needed to find a cost-effective way of ensuring a consistent, high quality global presence.

Solution

STA Travel chooses to work with IBM Global Business Services to invest in and realise long-term business transformation. One part of STA Travel’s business strategy was formulated to develop and implement a Global E-commerce Technology Strategy (known as GETS) that would enable rapid deployment and control across multiple web sites while still offering the flexibility to tailor local content where required. The solution was to be based on a single content management system (CMS) and, having evaluated various options against STA Travel’s requirements, IBM recommended RedDot as the preferred vendor.

RedDot’s CMS was already being used by STA Travel in Australia where feedback from users was extremely positive. Although the functionality enabled by RedDot’s CMS is very sophisticated, the user interface is simple to use. Webmasters and editors at STA Travel need a maximum of 3 days training and much of this is provided to ensure consistency - many people can use the CMS intuitively from day one.

The fact that RedDot offers concurrent user licences for its products was also advantageous for STA Travel. Corporate users in the UK are not logged on at the same time as users in Australia, for example, so working in different time zones brought significant savings. 

Timescales were very tight on the GETS project with only six months in which to get everything ready for the initial launch. "STA Travel's developers are based in Germany," explains Saskia Gaubig, IBM Senior Consultant on the GETS project. "It was a real help that both RedDot and IBM could provide technical resources in Germany. It meant that STA Travel received help and guidance on the spot and this contributed to meeting the tight deadlines."

RedDot CMS coped extremely well with STA Travel's multi-language sites. Craig Hepburn, Global WebMaster at STA Travel says. “RedDot’s CMS has some really good features like the Translation Editor. This ensures global consistency by enabling us to create English language content centrally that editors around the world can then localise.”

By implementing RedDot LiveServer, STA Travel has been able to integrate dynamic content from other web sites such as “Lonely Planet” and “What’s on When” into its own site, providing comprehensive destination information and advice. Pulling content from a licensed system known as “Off Exploring” enables visitors to STA Travel’s sites to create their own and read other peoples travel journals.

Throughout the implementation, STA Travel was very pleased with the level of service it received from RedDot. “The team at RedDot were very helpful when we needed some features that were not already included in the content management system. The import and export of shared content was added to the product at our request, for example,” says Hepburn.

Results

STA Travel initially launched its new online presence in the UK, Australia and the United States. The subsequent rollout to 13 countries is happening very quickly. "We don't have a large in-house team to help with the rollout," says Hepburn. "But the way RedDot CMS is designed makes it easy. We create one master project and rollout to the various countries from that, removing the need to recreate the whole set-up every time. This saved us two to three months of development work."

A further advantage is that any updates to web site templates or code, only have to be made once to the master project. These are replicated automatically in minutes to the other sites, avoiding manual updates, which often take weeks.

STA Travel has achieved plenty of efficiencies and productivity improvements from its new solution. Web editors can cross-train and share knowledge, plus changes and updates to content are far quicker and easier to handle. Changes can be completed by non-technical staff, avoiding bottlenecks and freeing technical experts to work on new developments and improvements. Hepburn says: “With our controlled template environment developed by IBM and the workflow processes included in RedDot’s CMS we feel comfortable letting non-technical people manage site content. The staff love it – it gives them far more control and offers competitive advantage.”

Once the rollout is complete, wherever in the world customers log onto an STA Travel web site, a consistent brand and image will shine through. This consistency has been achieved while still retaining the advantages of large amounts of local content.

Customers will get top quality online services, even in those countries where STA Travel’s market is small. The company can cost-effectively share the advantages that its large divisions can afford with its smaller divisions. And feedback is already showing that the richer content is very attractive to potential customers.

RedDot’s CMS has also helped STA Travel improve navigation on its sites. Hepburn, explains: "Navigation is more intuitive now and based on how travellers typically approach a trip."

Liney concludes: "The survival of STA Travel depends on having a successful online presence – it keeps us relevant. Our new solution is meeting all our required business objectives such as revenue generation, improved online sales conversion rates and increased referral income. Crucially, IBM and RedDot have equipped us to be far more agile, keeping up with the latest online trends to benefit our business."