It’s official: Pontoon are award winning! At the prestigious Travel Marketing Awards on July 16, we took home the prize for Travel Marketing Technology Supplier of the Year. Amongst fellow travel businesses from across the industry – and Strictly Come Dancing’s Anton Du Beke – we’re thrilled to be awarded with an accolade like this so soon after launching.
It speaks to all the hard work of the Pontoon team, which includes developers, designers, marketers and creatives, and the value the plugin has already brought to a range of cruise clients – and will continue doing into the future.
To learn more about our winning ways, why we won and what it means for us and our customers, continue reading.
Which award did we win?
We won Travel Marketing Technology Supplier of the Year. But we weren’t just the winners either, we were the inaugural winners. This year’s edition was the first time they featured this new the award, so of course, we’re doubly pleased with the result.
Why Pontoon was recognised
In the organisers’ words, the award “recognises a technology company that has developed the most impactful software, platform, or hardware solution designed to enhance how travel products are discovered, marketed, and sold”.
In the run up to the win, Pontoon was judged on how it solved “a specific marketing friction point while delivering a measurable competitive advantage to travel brands”. Let’s investigate this criteria in more detail to see why we took the award home.
Innovation
Pontoon innovates in a number of different ways. The level of customisation its capable of puts users at a distinct advantage over competitors. Instead of relying on third-party data exclusively, Pontoon lets travel businesses override and edit API-generated content. Have specific offers, packages and prices you want to highlight? Differentiators like these can be edited and customised within the CMS.
Without having to rely on sharing third-party content with other travel businesses, you can optimise existing itineraries with language that aligns with your brand’s distinct tone of voice too. In a sea of repeated content, rising above the competition becomes more than achievable. Add SEO-friendly solutions into the mix (something other iframe-based implementations lack), and the path towards increased brand awareness becomes a more streamlined process.
As for the visual elements of your itinerary pages, Pontoon maintains consistency across your branding, presenting itinerary data in the colours, fonts, and visuals in alignment with your brand guidelines. Pontoon supports rebranding too, so if you’ve decided it’s time for a change, your new visual elements will pull through once your site’s gone live, without issue.
Ease of Use and Efficiency
A huge part of Pontoon’s creation and development was to deal with challenges that came with slow page updates requiring technical team involvement. We also identified a need to modernise the process of uploading itineraries.
With a back end that emphasises user-friendliness, non-technical teams can take care of page uploads and amendments themselves, which saves on costs and greatly speeds up the time-to-market. No downtime, lost hours, or custom integrations that need developing here: the booking journey remains in motion, while greatly reducing the dependency on in-house developers.
Again on the back end, any content that users want to appear on site is handily compartmentalised into distinct blocks and parameters. This modular approach makes it easy for users to arrange where content sits on a given page – and how it should look. This further reduces technical heavy lifting, while allowing agents to choose the optimal location of information for where key conversions are more likely to occur.
Customer Success
Since integrating Pontoon into their websites, the plugin has provided our customers with a number of benefits, including:
- Eliminating the need for time-consuming developer assistance any time a page’s content updating.
- Maximising the value of Widgety’s existing top level itinerary information with additional content, offerings and brand-specific features.
- Pulling through full Widgety data for close to 60,000 cruise itineraries across a single customer’s website, empowering agents to apply exclusive deals and unique information to these pages.
- Bringing a booking journey onsite so customers could self-serve bookings without relying on a sales team in a different time zone.
What’s next for Pontoon?
Aside from our new website, which you’re currently reading, we’ve got more planned for the Pontoon pipeline.
With certain operators also taking direct bookings for the packages and cruises through Widgety, we’re in the process of creating a repeatable, automated integration which reduces the manual work these customers carry out to upload content from themselves to Widgety.
We’re also creating a functionality which packages together payload data (such as itinerary details) and the related customer enquiry, before passing it on to the client’s CRM tool. Once there, the enquiry can be assigned to the right person, followed up, or progressed and tracked through to booking – essentially using whatever process the client has set up in their CRM.
A Thank You to Our Customers
Before we sign off, we’d like to say a huge thank you to our customers. Without you, this award probably wouldn’t have been in our hands. All of your feedback and input lets us improve our product and shape a roadmap for success, for ourselves and for Pontoon’s customers.
Learn more about Pontoon
To discover more about how Pontoon can streamline your booking journey, discuss a setup that works for your business or ask us anything about our plugin, fill in our form. Someone from our team will respond to your query ASAP.