STA Travel Embraces Web 2.0

By Open Text Web Solutions

STA Travel is a world leader specializing in student travel, serving approximately six million customers spread across 90 countries and employing more than 2,000 people worldwide. A firm believer in quickly delivering a variety of travel products, services and advice through a mix of channels, the company has more than 350 retail branches located around the world.

“The survival of STA Travel depends on having a successful online presence – it keeps us relevant. Our new solution is meeting all our required business objectives such as revenue generation, improved online sales conversion rates, and increased referral income”
-Peter Liney, Chief Operating Officer, STA Travel

About STA Travel
STA Travel‘s Web site (www.statravel.com) is an important communication tool for attracting and engaging potential clients. Enriching and broadening the customer experience by providing convenient and serviceable access to multiple travel services, fostering user-generated content, and enabling interactive communications is a necessary top priority for STA Travel. With 16 different Web sites around the world, STA Travel wanted to:
• Find a cost-effective way of ensuring a consistent, agreeable, and homogenous global Web presence for young, dynamic and knowledgeable individuals.
• Publish content to Web 2.0 spaces (Facebook, twitter, YouTube, etc.) to find and engage customers - wherever they are.
• Leverage user-generated content to improve both customer experience and site traffic.
• Achieve all that with a robust, scalable platform that provides centralized control of all content assets without limiting service agility.

The challenge
Over 80% of customers begin their relationship with STA Travel on the internet. As a result, the STA Travel Web site is a vitally important component to its marketing strategy and for gaining new business.

“STA Travel customers are typically looking to enrich their travel experiences through online access to relevant products, services and advice at anytime, from anywhere in the world,”  says Peter Liney, Chief Operating Officer at STA Travel. “By providing innovative new facilities such as access to user generated travel logs and personal recommendations, we can greatly increase the appeal of our sites.”

However, all of STA Travel’s 16 Web sites operated independently, creating an inconsistent brand and user experience when customers visited a site. Also, functionality differed from site to site and providing cutting-edge technology at its global facilities for its young, tech savvy audience proved costly.

Centrally controlling the content for all sites was also a challenge, especially for keeping current in all languages with information that changed daily or even on an hourly basis, such as industry news, travel deals, top offers, discounts, and flight availability.

Moreover, STA Travel’s sites offered limited functionality for visitors to communicate, contribute information about their trips, share travel experiences, and build communities of interest.  In addition, there was no clear way to integrate content from the STA Travel site into online communities or social networking platforms, limiting STA Travel’s reach onto environments that were widely used by the company’s target audience.

A consistent brand experience
Part of STA Travel’s business strategy was formulated to develop and implement a Global E-commerce Technology Strategy that would make expeditious deployment and control across multiple Web sites possible, while still offering the flexibility and adaptability to tailor local content to local needs and demands. Open Text Web Solutions were chosen to provide the Web Content Management system that would support the Global E-commerce Technology Strategy for STA Travel.

One factor that attracted STA Travel to Open Text Web Solutions was the short training time for webmasters and editors who would be managing and posting content to the site through the intuitive user interface of the Open Text Web Content Management system.  With Open Text, STA Travel was able to meet a highly aggressive deployment schedule with due dates in less than 6 months for the initial project launch.

To ensure that content was consistent globally, STA Travel used Open Text’s strong and easy to use localization capabilities for creating different language . Local offices are automatically notified when new Web copy needs to be translated and added to the local versions of the STA Travel Web site.

Craig Hepburn, (former) Global Webmaster at STA Travel says: “Open Text’s CMS has some really good features like the Translation Editor. This ensures global consistency by enabling us to create English language content centrally that editors around the world can then localize.”

Web 2.0 in action
But the way STA Travel was able to transform their Web presence and deliver a truly unique customer experience to their Web site visitors was via the use of social media.
With Open Text Web Solutions, STA Travel was able to integrate dynamic content from other relevant Web sites such as “Lonely Planet” and “What’s on When” into its own site, providing a one-stop destination for comprehensive information and advice on travel locations and sight seeing points.

Furthermore, pulling content from a licensed system known as “Off Exploring” enabled STA Travel Web visitors to create their own user profiles and Web sites and read other visitor travel journals. They could even get their own experiences printed in the form of a booklet. Keeping friends and family updated about their trip was never before this simple.

STA Travel blogging and video sharing functionality encourages customer discussions around travel destinations and related activities.

Results
STA Travel launched new sites in 18 countries (including the UK, Australia, and the US) in more than 10 languages. “We don‘t have a large in-house team to help with the rollout,” says Hepburn. “But the way Open Text Web Solutions is designed makes it easy. We create one master CMS project and rollout to the various countries, removing the need to recreate the whole set-up every time. This saved us two to three months of development work.”

Since the Web Content Management system from Open Text allows STA Travel to control content from a centralized source, any template changes are implemented and materialized across all the country sites within minutes, thus saving STA staff members up to two weeks of manual labor.

As a result, customers are able to log into their STA profile and view a consistent, homogeneous, and flawless brand providing only top quality content. Now STA Travel can provide the same value to all customers, regardless of location or market presence in a particular country. The customer experience has been greatly improved compared to how it was before the implementation of the new Web site.

STA Travel Facebook community with user-generated content and numerous calls to action.

Hepburn says: “With our controlled template environment developed by IBM and the workflow processes included in the Open Text CMS, we feel comfortable letting non-technical people manage site content. The staff loves it – it gives them far more control and offers a competitive advantage.” Open Text Web Solutions has also helped STA Travel improve navigation on its sites. Hepburn explains: “Navigation is more intuitive now and is actually based on how travelers typically approach a trip.”

Liney states, “The survival of STA Travel depends on having a successful online presence – it keeps us relevant. Our new solution is meeting all our required business objectives such as revenue generation, improved online sales conversion rates, and increased referral income. Crucially, IBM and Open Text have equipped us to be far more agile, keeping up with the latest online trends to benefit our business.”

Since the implementation of Open Text Web Solutions around 20 per cent more product offerings could be uploaded to the STA Travel Web site.

With Open Text, STA Travel was able to:
• Improve employee productivity by eliminating bottlenecks and better allocating staff and IT resources.
• Empower the local Web product teams to manage and publish content to the Web, responding quickly to industry changes and travel updates.
• Enhance site usability and user service by providing customers with quality products, travel expertise, and excellent service, no matter where they are located.
• Deliver a personalized online experience with user-generated content, online networking, and travel experience sharing, resulting in increased conversions and customer retention.

“The survival of STA Travel depends on having a successful online presence – it keeps us relevant. Our new solution is meeting all our required business objectives such as revenue generation, improved online sales conversion rates, and increased referral income.” Peter Liney, Chief Operating Officer, STA Travel

Marketing and Innovation Awards
Category: Best Use of Social Media
Winner: STA Travel
“A superb series of tool and methods which continue to reach its target audience in a relevant and dynamic way. Both sensible and essential use of social media.”

Travel Agent Awards
Category: Best Travel Agent Web site
Highly Recommended: STA Travel
"The site clearly understands its target audience and has grabbed social media by the horns, ensuring an excellent all-round experience for users."

[Travolution awards 2008]