Prospect plans W&O digital strategy refresh

The consultancy won a three-way credentials pitch and is now redesigning the W&O homepage for a December launch.

Further capability will be added in 2011 and 2012, including booking features, a mobile Internet site, apps and social networking facilities.

After this, Prospect will work on a branding project that will see online strategy leading the offline brand. The website is a ’preliminary step’ that will ’anticipate further changes’ and inform repositioning of the offline brand, says Prospect director Richard Eisermann.

A desire to improve the reach of the company’s three brands – W&O Travel, Key 2 Holidays and Regent Holidays – has driven the project.

Eisermann says W&O has recently completed the acquisition of the other travel brands but the website that houses them needs to be ’reorganised and made clearer’. He adds, ’We need to make the site more navigable, the links clearer and resolve usability problems.’

The website will also host the ’W&Onderful’ campaign, developed with ad agency London Advertising. Prospect is integrating the image-rich and destination-focused campaign into the site in a bid to show ’travel as an experience’, Eisermann says. He adds that the company’s offer used to be ’use a magazine, pick up the telephone and speak with an agent’. The new work ’will move it into the digital space,’ he adds.

E-commerce manager for W&O Kerry-Anne Smith says the business takes ’a bespoke personal approach to holiday booking’. The challenge for Prospect will, she says, be ’to complement that approach in the most effective way possible’.