Thomas Cook Group

The challenge

Five banners sat inside the group, Thomas Cook, Air Tours, Direct Holidays, Hotels4U and Club 1830, each with its own market, its own audience and its own technology stack. That meant the same problem got solved five times over and rarely the same way. All of them were selling a high-consideration purchase through booking flows that had grown rather than been designed. Consistency was the obvious problem; conversion was the expensive one.

My role

Senior UX Designer (Lead). Led UX across international travel and ecommerce experiences, working across multiple brands and markets.

The approach

• Improved customer journeys end to end, from discovery through booking.
• Used customer insight, testing and optimisation to lift conversion rather than argue about taste.
• Helped define the experience strategy for migrating all five banners onto a single shared codebase, with local customisation so each market kept its own identity.
• Established more consistent digital experiences across brands and markets.
• Worked on Heartbeat, the internal employee platform carrying company news, collaboration tools and engagement across departments and locations.
• Supported the launch of the partnerships programme, defining the digital experience for partner integrations and working on in-house and out-of-home media.
• Worked with an external partner on the Companion App, which gave customers real-time holiday information, destination guides and in-destination offers.
• Worked in the Innovation Hub, testing Google Glass for airport and destination assistance, Oculus Rift for virtual holiday previews and drone footage for aerial travel content.

The outcome

Multi-brand

Consistency established across the group

Multi-market

International journeys improved

Discovery → booking

Full journey ownership

What I learned

It was the first time I'd worked somewhere that a small change to a booking flow was worth real money. That does something to how carefully you think. Measuring properly before and after stopped feeling like good practice and started feeling like the only honest way to have the argument at all.