For 50 years, luxury travel company Abercrombie & Kent has been famous for its personal, tailor-made service. But the company’s digital platforms weren’t quite up to the same impeccable standards.
A&K engaged Prospect to map out a robust digital strategy for the brand, including consolidating country websites into a seamless global, multi-channel customer experience and adding the business’s first online bookings service. Working together, we designed a future-oriented digital service that would empower customers and sales people curate the perfect tailor made journey – giving A&K’s brand and bottom line a boost.
Upselling inspiration
Global travellers expect more and more from their tailor-made travel providers. Increasingly they want an online service that complements or even improves on the high levels of service that are provided offline.
To position A&K for growth, Prospect envisioned a new travel curating tool that would inspire the most demanding and well travelled customers to easily tailor make the perfect journey – allowing them to playfully collect location, activities and accommodation type inspirations into a visual mood board. With sharing and co-creation tools so that friends and family could easily get involved in creating the ideal journey.
We worked closely with A&K to create a service capable of creating genuine efficiency and consistency in a company that had historically relied on printed travel itineraries. Whether in store, online or via the phone, the service would help to start the selection process digitally, saving time and costs for the company.
Ultimately, the this new multi-touchpoint retail service was designed to increase sales opportunities across all channels while streamlining operational processes significantly.
The new service was not fully implemented due to a change in operational priorities within A&K. But insights gained through the research and strategy process with Prospect helped the business to move more confidently forward with its digital customer offering.
Prospect designed an engaging platform for customer relationship building, offering real convenience and personalisation for Abercrombie & Kent’s customers and staff alike
Customers buy experiences, not just products
Abercrombie & Kent’s hallmark differentiator is a highly tailor-made experience, in more than 100 countries and on all seven continents. Local guides bring each stop on the journey to life with their intimate knowledge of the culture, history and wildlife of the destination. It’s an unsurpassed service that needed to be promoted effectively.
User research and user testing underpinned the redesign objectives and helped to define the core customer journeys. We redesigned A&K’s site architecture to support travellers’ decision-making needs, adding rich visual and text-based storytelling to showcase the brand’s unique itineraries and magical travel experiences.
We designed a mobile responsive solution to support travellers’ changing expectations to be inspired, book and share their perfect journey wherever they are, with reduced time and complexity
Complex travel booking made simple
The new booking engine was designed to sell a sophisticated travel portfolio and needed to deliver on A&K’s brand promise of highly tailor-made experiences.
The challenge was to ensure that customers could define the critical details of their journey without increasing unnecessary complexity early in the decision flow – allowing travel agents with the help of local experts to refine the details of the journey later on.
We thoroughly tested the solution globally, validating the business case before any technical developments would take place.
A&K were looking for an innovative and business centric agency that would support our strategic objectives to become the luxury travel market leader. Following a competitive pitch, we chose Prospect not only based on their extensive travel expertise, but also based on their sharp commercial mindset mixed with a rigorous people centred and service design approach. This magic combo helped us to unearth crucial customer insights and innovation opportunities, informing a highly visionary solution. With Prospect's undivided passion for excellence we have co-created a new travel experience that serves the fundamental goal to tailor-make the best travel experience in the industry. They are also very nice people to work with on top!
Tamarah Khatib, Director of Global Ecommerce, Abercrombie & Kent
Project Tags
Companies
Prospect
- Design