This was a pitch collaborating with the guys over at Fearless Ideas. I was all over this brief as I have had experience working on travel working on Tourism Australia plus my travel photography from my year out gave me great insight.
The problem
Intrepid Travel is one of the world’s leading small group adventure tour operators. They have been offering affordable and sustainable travel to backpackers and flashpackers from all over the world for over 20 years. Their site was in desperate need of an update and overhaul. They were looking for a snappy new site with a decent bespoke CMS and flexibility. They had over 7000 hard coded pages which was hard to edit and not cost effective.
They also wanted to improve SEO and social networking opportunities whilst also speeding up loading times and keep up with technical advances. Also they needed to improve members’ experience and created more inspiring content.
They asked us to create top-line ideas and thinking and show them how we would approach this task. Even though they hadn’t asked for any creative or page designs to be worked it was easier to our concepts in the form of a homepage and a couple of lower pages.
The Solution
Intrepid are all about Real people, Real value and Real life experiences. Our brainstorming, experiences and insights brought us to: Inspiration, Value and Trust. Recommendations from peers would deliver all of these attributes and is the most natural form of real life experiences. It is also what mostly all of us want from the web – transparency.
We decided to base the creative concept for the site around the idea of a community of backpackers. By giving our members a playground to play in we offered them the opportunity to upload their images, experiences, stories and journals and keep in touch with friends and family back home. This would also allow us to develop a relationship with our customers and help them with future travel plans. Many of them are ‘list tickers’ and they would be able to show their visited countries and cities on their profile pages. People thinking of embarking on a trip will be able to read journals, swap ideas and research.
We simplified the navigation and lead the homepage with a full bleed image and snippets from a journal chosen from a database. Javascript dropdowns keep the page minimal allowing the image more real estate. The user then expanded the panel and could explore through the info and view other images from the gallery.
Homepage images from the presentation. Concept only.
Homepage showing javascript dropdowns for journal entry and navigation
Lower page images from the presentation. Concept only.
Intrepid are based in Melbourne Australia and have many regional offices. We were up against two local agencies plus two from Sydney. Unfortunately Intrepid didn’t award us with the main task but the did refer us to the London office for future regional opportunities. They were very impressed with our work and our thinking. Reading in between the lines it did seem that the geography of the situation counted against us. Still, all was not lost as there is a strong possibility of a continued relationship with the London office.