Tribes Travel is an independent, award-winning, specialist travel company. Founded in 1998, the Tribes team create high-quality, tailor-made holidays, adventures and safaris; unmissable and inspirational travel experiences which aim to feed their clients spirit whilst also benefiting local wildlife, culture and caring for the environment.
Approach
After detailed exploratory meetings, Wild Dog set out a complete course of revising the Information Architecture. Working closely with the clients, we methodically deconstructed the website in terms of objectives (business, strategic, design and technical) and redeveloped the user journeys set against identified needs and wants of the typical audience persona, revisited site content and product make up.
Following this comprehensive process, we began the process of design, front and back end coding with new CMS and finally integration visa API with Tribes booking engine.
From our very first meeting with Wild Dog, we knew we were in good hands for our new website. The hugely professional and systematic approach they took, alongside their excellent creativity and clear-thinking, meant that the journey to a website we would love was quickly put in place.Amanda Marks, Director Tribes Travel Tribes Travel
The whole team excels at the tasks they take on, and we always felt we could ask anything we wanted to. A new company website carries a lot of hopes and expectations, as well as being so important for brand positioning, and Wild Dog has done us proud. We recommend them without hesitation.
Solution
A number of high level key objectives were identified from the brief, and developed by Wild Dog Design. Amongst these were:
Convey the brand and values of Tribes Travel. Key sentiments and design elements to project through both imagery and a conversational tone of voice were the Experience, Values, Passion, Safety, Environmental and the overall Personality of the Tribes team and offering.
Develop When to go Where as more of a navigational research tool; rather than being simply a list of data the section was reimagined and has become a truly useful, if not inspirational navigation tool within the site itself.
Find a role for Travel + Protect within the user journey. This is a major part of who Tribes is, and was indeed a founding cornerstone of the why the Directors started the company. The section was reimagined and brought back into the fore in order that existing and potential new clients fully understood who and what lies behind every tailored journey that Tribes create.
Rebuild Destinations as a more informative and inspirational platform from which to plan.
Rethink Accommodation. The Accommodation section had over the years simply become an enormous directory or repository of resorts and safari camps. With in excess of 1,000 accommodations the directly was hugely important to the sales team when liaising with clients (the ability to send a unique URL link to view a property); but it was dragging the public facing site into a state of overload and too much to view. The solution was to create a more manageable ’Top 10’ by Destination for the public, whilst developing a directory of the complete accommodation data (each with distinctive URL) to enable links to trip proposals and sales team correspondence (behind the scenes).
Within the newly designed Itinerary section, fewer itineraries were displayed. These were now positioned much more as inspirational ideas with a strong Call To Action to get in touch with Tribes; in addition the new structure enabled an opportunity to Up-sell and Cross-sell.
Develop Country/Travel Guides – Tribes’ knowledge & expertise is exceptional. Therefore rather than simply adopt the usual travel site navigation of Destination and/or Type, Tribes developed thematic subject guides (Big Cat Safaris) etc. Erudite, informative and beautifully illustrated with imagery a bank of guides was created. Website users can access a certain extent of the guide, but in exchange for signing up are granted full access with enhanced information as a data capture resource.
