Several obstacles stood in the way of the Hebridean booking journey. Discover how the river cruise site turned their slow processes into smooth sailing.

Hebridean’s website created its fair share of issues for both customers and internal staff.

• Their pre-booking journey was cumbersome, convoluted and unclear
• An externally-hosted booking system slowed the process further
• Customers struggled to navigate between these booking pages and the rest of Hebridean’s website

Internally, their staff had issues managing itineraries on-site too. While they could push their itinerary data to third-party agents, they had to manually repeat the process to use the same data on their own site, which took a great deal of time and effort.

Alongside these issues, Hebridean also felt that their website didn’t reflect the premium experience of their brand.

To address these challenges, we re-imagined their branding and crafted a new website to make their high-end offering clearer to both new and existing customers.

We integrated this new website with Pontoon™, so Hebridean could create and push itinerary data to Widgety without needing to repeat the process for third-party agents or their own website.

As for that slow booking process, we rectified this by integrating their site and Pontoon™ with Hebridean’s booking portal RESCO. This brought the booking journey on site, creating a smoother, more streamlined process for customers.

Thanks to their new Pontoon™-integrated website, Hebridean’s customers can now fully self serve high-cost bookings without the need for time-consuming consultations with the sales team.

As well as reducing sales pressure, customers based in vastly different timezones can now also self serve, free from assistance located on the other side of the world.

“One of the biggest issues of our old site was that customers had to book and pay through a third party, which affected things from both a journey and brand perspective.

“With Pontoon™’s features, we were able to sync Widgety itineraries with our Resco booking system, something that’s made our booking and payment processes far smoother. Our customers in different time zones can now book their next Hebridean adventure without the our sales team needing to manually assist them.

“We also have the ability to pull through our own itineraries through Pontoon™. Previously, we would have to submit each new itinerary to Widgety, who then distributed the info to third-party travel agents and their partners, which was time and resource intensive for us. Pontoon™ means we only have to do this a single time”.