STA Travel Strengthens Brand with Multiple Country Sites

STA Travel is a world leader specializing in student travel, serving approximately six

million customers spread across 90 countries and employing more than 2000 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.

About STA Travel

As the world‘s largest student travel

organization, the STA Travel Web site is an

important communication tool for engaging

potential clients. Enriching and broadening

the customer experience by providing

convenient and serviceable access to multiple

travel products, commodities and services 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.

Challenge

Over 80 percent 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 gaining new business.

"Typically, STA Travel customers are 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."

STA Travel

RedDot has given us consistency across multiple global web sites

guranteeing a good experience to everyone

However, all of STA Travel’s 16 Web sites

operated independently, creating an

inconsistent brand and user experience when

customers visited the 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.

Solution

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. RedDot was chosen as

the Content Management System that would

support the Global E-commerce Technology

Strategy for STA Travel‘s web solution.

One factor that attracted STA Travel to RedDot

was its short training time for Webmasters and

editors who would be managing and posting

content to the site through the intuitive user

interface of the RedDot Content Management

Systems. With RedDot, STA Travel was able

to meet a highly aggressive and limiting

deadline with its due date arriving in less than

6 months for the initial project launch.

To ensure that content was consistent

globally, STA Travel used RedDot’s strong

and easy to use localization capabilities for

creating different language variants while

ensuring that the global appearance was kept.

Local offices are automatically notified when

new texts need to be translated and added to

the local versions of the STA Travel website.

Craig Hepburn, Global Webmaster at STA

Travel says. “RedDot’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.”

For delivering contextualized content to

visitors, STA Travel has been 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, all-embracing

information and advice on travel locations.

“RedDot’s CMS has some

really good features like the

Translation Editor.”

STA Travel Strengthens Brand with Multiple Country Sites

Pulling content from a licensed system

known as “Off Exploring” enables STA

Travel Web visitors to create their own user

profiles and web sites and read other visitor

travel journals. They can 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.

Results

Throughout the implementation, STA was very

pleased with the level of service it received

from RedDot. “The team at RedDot were very

helpful when we needed some features that

were not already included in the content

management system. For example, the import

and export of shared content was added to

the product at our request,” says Hepburn.

STA Travel initially launched new sites in

the UK, Australia and the United States.

They plan on executing a site rollout for 13

additional countries soon. "We don‘t have a

large in-house team to help with the rollout,"

says Hepburn. "But the way RedDot CMS is

designed makes it easy. We create one master

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 RedDot allows STA to control content

from a centralized source, any template

changes are implemented and materialized

across the 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 and serviceableness

to all customers, regardless of location or

market presence in a particular country.

The customer experience has been

elevated compared to how it was before the

implementation of the new website.

Hepburn says: “With our controlled template

environment developed by IBM and the

workflow processes included in RedDot’s

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.” RedDot’s CMS has

also helped STA Travel improve navigation

on its sites. Hepburn, explains: “Navigation

is more intuitive now and based on how

travellers 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

RedDot enables intuitive use of the site and enables the user to quickly

find the informations they are looking for.

"The way RedDot CMS is

designed makes it easy."

About RedDot, The Open Text Web Solutions Group

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Content Management (WCM), provides Web-Centric ECM solutions to create, manage and

deliver the content that drives business. Open Text content management and delivery solutions

are recognised throughout the industry for their legendary ease of use and feature leading

multilingual support; enterprise Web 2.0 capabilities; content integration; and contextualised

delivery. From midmarket to enterprise, more than 2,600 clients around the world rely on Open Text

Web Solutions to create, manage and deliver personalised Web experiences for their Intranets,

Extranets and Web sites. For more information about The Open Text Web Solutions Group, please

visit: www.reddot.co.uk

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RedDot have equipped us to be far more agile,

keeping up with the latest online trends to

benefit our business.”

Since the implementation of the RedDot

Content Management System around 20

per cent more product offerings could be

uploaded to the STA Travels Website.

With RedDot, STA Travel’s Web

sites have enabled them to:

Improve employee productivity by elimina-

ting bottlenecks and better allocating staff

and IT resources

Increase cross training and knowledge sha-

ring among employees

Easily manage and publish content to the

Web, responding quickly to industry chan-

ges and travel updates

Satisfy customers by providing them with

quality products, travel expertise and

excellent service, no matter where they are

located

STA Travel‘s developers are based in Germany. It was a real

help that both RedDot and IBM could provide technical

resources in Germany. It meant that STA Travel received help

and guidance on the spot and this contributed to meeting

the tight deadlines.

> Saskia Gaubig, IBM Senior Consultant on the GETS project