A new platform for paradise

Just by virtue of its scarcity, making a plan for vacation time can be a pressure-filled effort to “get it right”. While many destinations cater to the getaway daydreamer, user anxiety actually increases the further one moves down the sales funnel. Vacation organizers need a resource that evokes the same convenience and simplicity in planning and booking as the actual experience of being on vacation. Yet, this ease-of-use on the visitor end must be carefully balanced on the client’s content management side to accommodate a worldwide visitor base with multiple languages and APIs..

Because a better customer experience means a better conversion rate, customization is crucial. With over 40% of Internet users aiming to personalize their travel experiences, it’s important to provide them with the specific information they need instead of merely serving them with ads. Just as importantly, the key to success is providing quick and thoughtful answers that turn into inspiration. Nearly two-thirds of travelers use social media to plan trips and nearly half consult user reviews and recommendations. For these reasons, the reimagined Aruba.com would be built upon three key pillars.

CONTENT
Information about Aruba. Where is it? What’s there? What’s it like? How does traveling there work?

COMMERCE
Applications for booking vacations (among other products) and transacting with visitors.

PERSONALIZATION
Planning tools to enable each visitor to create a customized vacation across time and space.

Building a solution that would drive traffic and meet the needs of today’s digital-centric traveler meant building an Aruba.com that’s simple, distinct and persuasive. To do this, we re-considered the Aruba.com experience from the perspectives of first-time visitors by recreating their user journeys.

At the same time, it also meant building an infrastructure that would support the more robust and frequently-updated content offering. This called for a whole new CMS platform that could be easily managed by Aruba Tourism’s internal team while accommodating the destination’s global, multi-lingual visitor base.

The newly redesigned site accommodates unlimited scalability powered by a Drupal CMS. To accommodate Aruba’s global scope of visitors, we built the CMS to support regional versions of the global site templates that could serve the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, German, Italian, and Swedish-speaking markets. The CMS is also integrated with a CRM customer re-engagement and re-targeting.

We created a stylized interactive Google Map of Aruba, showing key points of interest around the island and including functionality for the stylized overlay, custom markers, and preview dialogues for each marker.

The redesigned site also includes a curated image collection populated with Aruba Tourism’s most compelling and enticing photo assets.

The site is campaign agnostic, while still adaptable to include marketing campaign content, such as Aruba’s ongoing Happy Returners ambassador campaign, when relevant.

The new redesign enables visitors to save content while browsing the site, letting them collect their favorite content to assist in trip planning and itinerary building. This “favorite” content is easily accessible throughout the site and is presented in an appealing, shareable format.

To enable visitors to reserve and purchase more easily, Amp integrated third-party JackRabbit Systems technology to link the site’s existing booking engine widget.

We also boosted the social presence of content within the site by adding ShareThis.com functionality that enables sharing of individual pages, and a Facebook commenting social plug-in that allows users to comment without logging in.

We redesigned the entire look of Aruba.com, implementing new color schemes and design elements that embodied and strengthened the essence of the Aruba brand. The new site helps Aruba Tourism surface more compelling content by repurposing both existing and new third-party content. Our new design reorganizes images, video, and copy throughout the site to reach visitors with the right content at the most relevant points in their individual user journeys.

We created a stylized interactive Google Map of Aruba, showing key points of interest around the island and including functionality for the stylized overlay, custom markers, and preview dialogues for each marker.

The site is campaign agnostic, while still adaptable to include marketing campaign content, such as Aruba’s ongoing Happy Returners ambassador campaign, when relevant.

The new redesign enables visitors to save content while browsing the site, letting them collect their favorite content to assist in trip planning and itinerary building. This “favorite” content is easily accessible throughout the site and is presented in an appealing, shareable format.

To enable visitors to reserve and purchase more easily, Amp integrated third-party JackRabbit Systems technology to link the site’s existing booking engine widget.

We also boosted the social presence of content within the site by adding ShareThis.com functionality that enables sharing of individual pages, and a Facebook commenting social plug-in that allows users to comment without logging in.