Escape Travel Group
Escape Travel is Norway's largest route-based tour operator.
We have collaborated with Sikt Reklame on Escape's digital universe since 2017.
The tour operators at Escape Travel, Carpe Diem, and Cruise.no offer travel experiences within cruises, river cruises, round trips, sports trips, solo trips, active trips, business trips, and much more 😅
The dialogue with Sikt Reklame and Escape started with the following request: A new online platform for all companies in Escape Travel Group, where fresh, tailored content can be created within minutes and across different niches in the travel industry.
Technology
- Craft CMS
- Tailwind CSS
- React
- GSAP
- Mapbox
- Mux
- Algolia
Bespoke travel. Bespoke websites.
We started cautiously and exploratively in 2017, developing smaller solutions for Escape Sport and Carpe Diem (which provide tailor-made solo trips). These websites had many things in common, but were still independent - for better or worse.
In 2019, we were tasked with building new websites for Escape Travel in Norway and Sweden. Now, the time seemed right to bring together all the threads and experiences from the work that had been done so far, and realize the vision of a larger, shared solution that could encompass all the companies in the Escape Travel Group.
The result was a flexible, lightweight, and scalable solution for travel presentations, blog posts, special offers, and campaign pages, with a well-stocked digital toolbox of flexible content modules - and most importantly: with smart solutions for customized content reuse such as travel itineraries, practical information, interactive maps, and travel conditions 🎉
Integrations, integrations, integrations!
The travel industry can be quite complex.
Fortunately, with many years of experience in developing custom functionality for Craft CMS, we had a good foundation for developing various integrations with different third-party systems for booking, flight schedules, external content, marketing, and CRM - all tightly and seamlessly integrated with Escapes' own content 💪
Hot DAM! 🔥
A picture says more than a thousand words, and Escape had thousands of great pictures and videos. The problem was that this content was spread across various web solutions, internal servers, and Dropbox accounts, making it less accessible to content producers.
The question we asked ourselves: would it be possible to gather all this material in one central solution and then use it seamlessly and efficiently across the different websites in the platform?
In cooperation with Escape and Sikt Reklame, we evaluated several DAM solutions (Digital Asset Manager), but none of them could deliver the seamless user experience that Escape desired.
The solution seemed obvious: of course, we built a bespoke DAM 🎉
- A central hub for all image and video material in Escape Travel Group
- Automatic translation of image captions and text for screen readers through Google Translate API
- Automatic tagging and categorization of images through Amazon Rekognition API
- Intelligent and lightning-fast search function through Algolia
- CDN and optimization of images and videos through Imgix and Mux
- Headless SPA developed on React, with an intuitive and specially designed interface for uploading and managing images and videos
- Seamless integration with Craft CMS
A family of websites
The various companies under the Escape umbrella have a lot in common - but they are all unique, with their own needs, opportunities, and challenges within different segments of the travel industry.
Escape Norway and Escape Sweden focus on tailor-made trips, with functionality for sending interactive special offers and handling requests for unique travel experiences. Cruise.no has its own content modules and functionality for cruise trips, shipping companies, and ships, while Indre Østfold Travel Agency is tailored to the niche of sports travel. Just to mention a few.
A common technical platform has made it efficient to maintain and further develop all these websites over time, and with a solution that has been designed and developed with a balanced focus on flexibility and productivity, the tour designers in Escape can work (and collaborate) more efficiently than ever.
A journey that continues ✈️
The world is changing rapidly, and the travel industry must constantly adapt to new challenges - and opportunities.
Værsågod continues the collaboration with Sikt Reklame and Escape to further develop the solution, both for the individual companies and the people who work in them, but also for Escape Travel Group as a whole.
