Together Travel Co. (Together Travel or TTC) is a dynamic and evolving holiday company. They are a business that has been built on the foundations of sustainability, luxury and quality. They believe in showcasing the most inspiring destinations across the UK.
They are here to redefine what it means to holiday on home-turf. Their exceptional cottages, apartments, lodges and villas provide an opportunity to reconnect in a beautiful home away from home.
Together Travel Co. is dedicated to ensuring their guests leave feeling restored and re-connected; having enjoyed quality time and precious memories, together with those they treasure most.
We have been working with Together Travel Co. (formerly Natural Retreats) since 2014. Over this duration we have built a long-standing relationship as their technical arm of the business.
When we were first introduced to Together Travel, they were experiencing a phase of rapid growth. Their existing technical infrastructure could not scale to meet the needs of their growing requirements, and they knew that they had to make improvements and needed expertise to understand how they could achieve their objectives.
At the time their business operations relied on a booking platform, a property management system (PMS), and a customer facing website. There was no integration between these systems which created friction and unnecessary admin in the operation of their services.
At this stage they appointed an agency to design a new website, but the agency did not have the technical expertise to carry out the development work to meet their requirements. They spoke with several other web development agencies during this period before their CTO was introduced to us.
During the initial discovery meetings with the TTC team, we agreed on their requirements for this project.:
Their property management system forms the backbone of their property booking operations and customer journey. To ensure the best possible experience for their customers and to maintain control of their brand’s visual identity, integrating the PMS directly with their website was a high priority.
With a well-defined set of content blocks, layouts, and preset visual styles, the content management team needed a set of tools to allow them to create new pages.
This project began in the early days of “mobile first design” where websites would be built with mobile layouts as the primary focus. We knew that TTC would need to be ahead of the curve in their fast-paced industry and design their website to be fully responsive across a variety of mobile devices.
Together Travel needed a provider who could fully deliver, host and support their solutions. It was important to have a supplier that had the expertise to cover all areas of their web and technology needs.
Together Travel’s existing website was built and maintained with a popular and widely used content management system (CMS); however, following the significant growth of their business their infrastructure could no longer meet the operational requirements. The CMS restricted integrating with their other systems which was a serious limitation while trying to expand the business.
We knew that a “headless” CMS would allow them to continue to be self-sufficient in creating and updating their website content while simultaneously preserving brand consistency with the use of predefined content blocks and agreed upon visual styles and layouts.
Together Travel needed to have control of the content across their website, however it was important that visual styles and layouts were consistent throughout.
Historically website admins were used to creating or updating web pages and could easily change layouts and styles, like the font height, weight, or colour, creating a design that might be different from one team member to the next. This led to inconsistent styling across their marketing material and was identified as a significant operational dilemma that they needed to address.
We settled on a custom-made content management interface that had enough control for website content admins to carry out their roles without the ability to directly change agreed upon styles and layouts, conforming to their brand guidelines. We worked directly with their content team to design standardised content blocks and layouts that they could make use of to build out their content.
With this new content management system website content admins could make use of predefined “widgets”, content blocks, and layouts when building out web pages. For example, ‘latest offers’ or ‘last minute deals’ sections can be added directly to a new page. The content creator does not need to update or style this block, it adopts the style from the pre-configured styles with the relevant data from the PMS.
This new approach to content management significantly streamlined Together Travel’s marketing efforts, allowing a dynamic and scheduled population of the front-end of the website, while adhering to their brand guidelines.
Creating a holistic and seamless customer journey was one of TTCs highest priorities for this project. As a provider of luxury holiday rentals, they needed to provide a high quality and friction free user experience throughout the user’s journey with them.
Part of the puzzle was to present their property availability and booking functionality directly on the website, where previously users would be directed to an external property management system.
We worked with the developers of the property management software to create an API which would provide the new website integration. This would solve significant pain points they had with their booking and property management solutions:
Historically users who wished to make a booking with Together Travel would navigate from the main website to a dedicated booking portal within their property management system. From here the booking was made and the PMS was updated. This system meant that availability was not always correct, and the price updates required a lot of manual input. Additionally, analytical data was limited due to the visitor changing to the booking portal to complete their reservation.
The new website needed to integrate with the PMS to fetch real-time availability data and display it directly on the website providing a more seamless and cohesive onsite booking experience.
The website could now provide the same booking functionality without needing to leave the TTC website. This meant that their customers would complete all the booking actions in the same browser window in one seamless interaction.
Maintaining full ownership of their technology stack, which was identified as one of the business owners’ key objectives. One of the major benefits it brought to TTC was the added commercial value it brought to the company. This will play a significant part in the company valuation should the time to sell arrive for the business.
Displaying content in relevant locations across the website was paramount to the overall success of the project.
The custom API to connect the PMS with the website enabled the retrieval of data from the PMS. This could then be displayed on the frontend of the website. Property availability data was now automatically shown and updated meaning there was no chance of duplicate bookings. Another benefit of this was those changes to property data and availability could be made from one place, meaning staff only needed to learn one system.
Mobile-friendly web design was still in its infancy at the time. This was common in larger companies, so, in a hyper competitive travel sector, Together Travel had to secure their place in the mobile web. With significant uplift in mobile website visits, they believed there was immense value in catering to mobile users.
Their website was designed to be mobile friendly and has since been “mobile-first” optimised as many of their visitors use mobile devices to interact with the site.
Initially mobile payments were not common, but this has since become a necessity – something that we address later in this case study.
Together Travel Co. required a supplier(partner) that they could work closely with and achieve the desired results as efficiently as possible.
In 2015 Together Travel moved their operation to the U.S. During the transition they commissioned a New York-based agency to work with, but they were not able to fulfil the demands of the business as it grew, and we were called back to provide technical expertise they needed.
Ultimately the company decided to separate the UK branch from the US, and we were appointed as the technical team for the UK branch.
In 2019, the UK branch separated entirely and rebranded completely to become Together Travel Co.
As a mature business, Together Travel Co. knew the direction they were heading. Our technical knowledge would be key to make their operation a success. The initial plans were to:
We would need to build a new custom integration, configure a new payment provider and rebrand the visuals of the website, while also refreshing older content.
The new property management system is called SuperControl. We massaged the API for this new PMS to best integrate in with the flow on our CMS and website. This allowed us to retrieve the data required for the front-end of the website and important booking and payment data to be sent to SuperControl PMS.
The existing payment processor – SagePay; became too expensive and unreliable so TTC needed to upgrade their payment system. SuperControl only supported direct integration with SagePay, so we needed to find a way to integrate with a new, more reliable and modern, payment provider. It had to also provide an interface to make “MOTO” payments for bookings made over the phone – something that was not possible previously with SagePay.
The solution was to design and build a completely bespoke payment portal which interfaces between Stripe and Super Control. The custom integration handles payments made online and in person and writes back to the SuperControl PMS to allocate the payment to a booking. This allowed TTC to migrate to a more suitable payment provider despite a lack of integration from the PMS.
Together Travel Co. is also custodian to several sub-brands for popular destinations around the UK. Amongst these are the websites for Lews Castle, Visit John O’Groats, Natural Land, Rock and North Cornwall, and Canalside Cottages. In subsequent years, we have been commissioned to re-design and build the websites.
Brand guidelines were created to cater to each of the website’s theme and content. It was important to create separate identities for these websites while maintaining a sense of familiarity with the Together Travel brand.
Cruically, the websites cross linked between the main Together Travel Co. website to generate organic traffic as well as valuable contextual SEO content.
Our primary role working with Together Travel Co. is to provide technical development expertise. They provide us with their requirements, and we carry out the system design. We assess their needs, and work within their allocated budget to choose the solutions that provide them with the best possible outcomes.
The relationship works on a sliding scale, with the speed at which they need delivery directly correlating with their available budget. We understand the need to provide serviceable solutions to each task we are assigned to ensure maintenance and upkeep can easily and quickly be provided.
We have forged a long-term partnership, we have been able to provide uninterrupted, high levels of technical expertise. Over the years staff members on both sides may have changed, but our continual partnership means that we understand their overarching long-term business objectives, which allows us to continue providing the solutions.
With their various stakeholders having different wants and needs from the project. Weekly Teams meetings and monthly in person are carried out which has helped keep everyone on track with the strict project plans while also providing an ongoing feedback loop.
Huge amounts of user acceptance testing (UAT) were conducted by a centralised team champion who fed improvements back to us. This has allowed us to continue to design, develop and test ensuring there are no bottlenecks in the process.
As with every project, security and data protection are at the forefront of everything we have done and will do for all our clients. The website is secure and GDPR compliant, bringing peace of mind to our client. To achieve this, we proactively monitor the websites vitals and enforce strict access control to the systems. Additionally, we have designed a monitoring system to notify us of key events.
As with every web design and development project, we promise 99.99% uptime. Their service is always available and fast, which means their customers can book their holiday destinations with no fuss.
We monitor service uptime and proactively monitor the site for any unexpected outages. The system has been designed to notify us of key events, whether this is a new booking, a failed booking or payment. This means that we are always on top before anything fails and can take action to prevent any disruption to the service.
We take a proactive approach to the way in which we support our clients, carrying out activities including software version upgrades, improvements to the infrastructure, and updating the CMS. By being proactive, we can usually predict any issues ahead of time and act accordingly to prevent or minimise the impact.
We take an evergreen approach to supporting our clients. This means that we roll out continuous incremental improvements, rather than one large transformative project. We have been involved in planning future development work for TTC. From scoping the feasibility of the project to infrastructure updates and the implementation of new systems, we act as an integral member of their team.
Together Travel Co. has seen impressive year on year growth. Most of their bookings are taken directly through the website booking interface and had seen a massive increase in mobile bookings over recent years. This stands as testament to the adoption and implementation of new technologies that help keep Together Travel Co. ahead of the field.
As most people couldn’t travel during COVID the company saw great growth with their UK-based holiday sales. We had to evolve with TTC to meet their increased and changing demands during this period as people chose staycations as a method to get away. This helped firmly establish them as one of the top luxury UK destination holiday providers.
Weaving Webs Limited is a company registered in England and Wales. Registered number: 03739247.
Registered office: Weaving Webs Ltd, The Den, Bridge Street, Buckingham, MK18 1EL. VAT reg no: 277 6535 60
