Big Five Tours & Expeditions is a premier luxury tour company offering individualized vacations worldwide. From custom-designed private vacations to fully-escorted special interest groups, Big Five specializes in satisfying discriminating taste for the ultimate travel experience. Consistently named as one of the Top Tour Operators in the World by readers of Travel+ Leisure magazine since 1999, they are the preferred choice for the discriminating traveler. The 2005 World’s Best Awards once again placed Big Five Tours & Expeditions among the very best for its superior traveler satisfaction.
Big Five contacted THAT Agency to overhaul their website design so that it would allow their customers and travel agents the ability to more easily navigate through the site. With clear directive to create a high-end look and feel, THAT Agency achieve that goal, while applying a hierarcheral, user-friendly structure. Utilizing a luxurious color palatte, THAT Agency was able to lend a rich look to the custom tour website design, while allowing their amazing tour imagery to take center stage and do the selling for Big Five. At the center of the home page, lives a Flash panel, which incorporates a custom transition to fade from image to image.
The scaleable Big Five Tours & Expeditions website was built on a PHP Platform, utilizing table-less CSS, as well as custom flash development and AJAX technology. Two search features were built into the website, allowing users to easily search and find their desired destination and/or tour. Additionally, users are able to notify their friends and family about their upcoming trip, but utilizing the Flash postcard feature, which allows them to customize and send their own online postcard to their recipients of choice. Technologies Used: PHP, CSS, AJAX and Flash.
The Big Five Tours & Expedition’s website was built around a feature-rich custom content management system (CMS). With specific needs in place, a pre-built content management system would not afford Big Five with the robust-ness and flexibility as a custom CMS would. Big Five is able to manage all of their Tours, Destinations and Regions with an intuitive categorization schema, allowing them to create a web of information. Additionally, Big Five has perspective on all lead submissions that are submitted through the site, and which Travel Agents they are directed to. Specials, Press Releases, Testimonials and Email Marketing Campaigns are also manageable via their backend.
THAT Agency helped Big Five accomplish their SEO goals accomplished first by developing a search engine friendly website, with content sections optimized around a general theme. With an ongoing link baiting and development strategy in action, Big Five continues to see steady growth in traffic and leads for a wide variety of keyword phrases related to their service offerings.
This experience has been the best reason to shift from full-time design staff to an outside firm. Your team has been timely, accurate and detail-oriented in every project we give them. Not only have they been there whenever we need them, but the work has been vital to our brand identity.