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 It’s been just over one hundred years since coach operators first opened for business in the UK. At a time when a motor car was a rarity, these pioneers provided a low cost flexible option for the general public to travel to distant places, events and holidays that would otherwise have been difficult to reach.
Today’s coach operators are not very different from the first pioneers. Although car ownership is at record levels, coaches still provide an economical, comfortable and highly convenient solution for group travel. Indeed, given the concerns over global warming, their services are likely to be in even greater demand.
In the Solent area, Avensis Coach Travel – previously named Buddens Coaches - is one of the largest and most respected coach operators specialising in private hire, coach trips, tours and UK and European holidays.
Re-branded to Avensis in 2006 following a management buy-out, the company’s first task was to build brand awareness and develop an effective web presence to maintain its competitiveness. Unfortunately, previous forays into building a web site through a web developer had not been a success – the site had under-delivered, was very overpriced and incurred continuing costs to keep its content up to date.
Following the MBO, Avensis wished to appoint a different web developer to replicate its old site using its new corporate identity but with new content, navigation and some significant changes to functionality.
Gillian Liesnham, Managing Director, Web-Feet comments, ‘It was not surprising that Avensis were initially very sceptical about the capabilities and promises made by web developers. It was a typical case of ‘once bitten, twice shy’, so we were fortunate that we had already proved ourselves for one of their sister companies which specialised in providing luxury coach services for famous bands and musicians on tour.”
Web-Feet were briefed by Avensis to develop a new site which included:
- A new Content Management System [CMS] which enabled Avensis to update content themselves without incurring costs – this was a vital improvement because of the constantly changing itinerary of available trips, excursions and holidays. As part of the CMS they also wished to be able to include photographs of destinations to make them more exciting and appealing – as the saying goes, ‘ a picture paints a thousand words’.
- An option to enable customers to be able to book places and to take payments online. As part of this they also wanted to include an option for customers to be able to specify which pre-determined pick up/alightment points they wanted to use. The intention was to provide much more information and up to date content than was available through their annual brochure.
- A complete re-think on navigation to ensure that it became much more user friendly and easy to use.
- A radical overhaul of their search engine optimisation programme – bizarrely, they seemed to be attracting unsuitable ‘private hire’ enquiries from Europe but very little traffic from their Solent catchment area.
Understandably, the new management team were keen to keep costs down and needed to not only achieve these objectives but to work with a budget of one third of the investment required to develop the original site.
Andy Coley, Technical Director, Web-Feet comments, “The key improvement was to take bookings on line which they couldn’t do before. As with many other web sites, the main difficulty is to design a clear and easy process so that a customer completes the booking and doesn’t abandon. This is particularly important for the payment mechanism.”
The other complexity was ensuring that we developed a booking system that was able to cope with the variety of options and prices available. For example, a single holiday booking has to cope with the number of adults, pick up locations, single supplements, insurance cover and bedroom availability. More importantly it had to be user friendly to enable Avensis to enter a pricing matrix for each new holiday or excursion. This has been achieved via Active Server Pages, a database driven solution which enables them to put in as many routes or trips as they want to”.
So a year on, what have been the benefits to Avensis?
Gillian Liesnham concludes, “We have received very positive feedback about how pleased Avensis are with the site. It has provided them with complete control and has delivered an effective online booking system which continues to grow in usage. It’s also much easier for their customers to browse through and make choices.
In addition, search engine rankings and site traffic have both improved substantially as a consequence of our keyword research, link strategy, ongoing optimisation plus improved management information from the use of our in-depth stats package. For example, this enables them to track right back to source of sales via keywords and to fine tune their keyword strategy.
We have now also been asked to add further functionality to enable their corporate clients to pay their invoices online – and there is also further scope for integrating their web site with both their telephone and postal bookings and their back office systems.”
A century ago, the first coach operators were adopting new technology and trying to cope with a road system not designed for motorised transport. Today’s coach operators face a different kind of technology challenge – how to keep their businesses on the road by managing web navigation, site traffic and satisfying the demands of virtual visitors! 
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