Gray Line is the most well-known sightseeing brand globally, and the oldest and largest tour company of its kind – so the stakes were very high for us.
(PRWEB UK) 4 July 2014
Dojo, an emerging leader in the Scottish design community, established itself as the best partner to create Gray Line’s new web strategy over some top global digital agencies due in large part to its successful track record with travel companies – especially within the tours and activities sector.
“We felt the Dojo team understood our business, collaborated well, had great knowledge about today’s web technologies and, most importantly, met our deadlines,” said Brett Asbury, executive vice president, Gray Line Worldwide. “Gray Line is very proud to be the leader in delivering incredible tour experiences on the ground, and we wanted to transition that expertise to our online offering. As a first-mover to a fully mobile-responsive offering of this scale within our industry, we are well positioned for the future and hope to continue working with Dojo to expand our online consumer presence.”
The new grayline.com site features some notable improvements in the industry that help consumers navigate thousands of tours in hundreds of locations:
1. An optimised responsive website experience through any browsing device including smartphones, tablets and desktop computers
2. Streamlined shopping and booking with a single consolidated shopping cart and checkout page
3. Integrated tour upgrades and add-ons built into a single robust product page
4. Interactive maps for destination searches, customer pickups and tour departures
5. New social media and sharing tools for products on the site
“Gray Line is the most well-known sightseeing brand globally, and the oldest and largest tour company of its kind – so the stakes were very high for us,” said Chris Torres, owner and director of Dojo Design Studio. “Many other leading travel sellers in this space have a dedicated mobile site or a mobile app for booking tours. Gray Line wanted to do something different to consolidate their online efforts and operate as efficiently as possible. We worked with them to utilise the mobile-responsive method to create an app-like experience for mobile users and a delightful desktop experience all within a single website.”
Central to the success of the new strategy was TourCMS, a leading global reservation system for tour and activity companies and used by Gray Line as its central booking platform. By building on Gray Line’s existing technology partner’s API at TourCMS, Dojo was able to deliver the first end-to-end mobile responsive site in the tour sector on a global scale.
Alex Bainbridge, CEO of TourCMS adds, “Specialist agencies like Dojo bring new expertise to complex digital projects and enable us at TourCMS to focus on building best in class reservation and distribution systems for specialist local tour operators.”
Gray Line and Dojo have launched the first phase of the project – the mobile responsive website and Gray Line’s branded template sites, available to all 100 local Gray Line operators. The new Gray Line sites, which include grayline.com and local licensee sites (e.g. graylinelasvegas.com), will be used by millions of customers around the globe across all devices, yet still deliver one great consistent user experience. Initial results for the new site have been overwhelmingly positive with increases in unique visitors and mobile device bookings. Grayline.com recorded its highest sales and conversion for the year shortly after the launch of the new site.
Dojo and Gray Line have plans to launch a new content strategy for grayline.com later this year, which will include a digital magazine, media rich landing pages and a revamped blog.