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. "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. Open Text Web Solutions 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 Open Text Web Solutions 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 content management system. With Open Text Web Solutions, 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 Open Text Web Solutions’ 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 Web site. Craig Hepburn, Global Webmaster at STA Travel says. "Open Text Web Solutions 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 and sight seeing points.

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 Open Text Web Solutions. "The team was 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 Open Text Web Solutions 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 Open Text Web Solutions 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 Open Text Web Solutions, 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." The 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 site. Open Text Web Solutions enables intuitive use of the site and enables the user to quickly find the informations they are looking for."

With Open Text Web Solutions, STA Travel’s Web Sites Have Enabled Them to:

• Improve employee productivity by eliminating bottlenecks and better allocating staff and IT resources
• Increase cross training and knowledge sharing among employees
• Easily manage and publish content to the Web, responding quickly to industry changes and travel updates
• Satisfy customers by providing them with quality products, travel expertise and excellent service, no matter where they are located.