Travel Keys

London, UK · 2016

Pixel-perfect website design. Elegant website design and modern frontend development for one of the biggest luxury travel brokers in the world.

01CONTEXT

Travel Keys is an elite travel broker representing an enticing collection of 5,000 hand-picked luxury villas in more than 75 destinations throughout the Caribbean, Mexico, Hawaii, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the United States.

With nearly 25 years of experience, TravelKeys' specialized staff is adept at ensuring flawless villa experiences.

02ambition

Finding themselves on an ascending growth trend, the team at Travel Keys was diligently preparing for an upcoming major event that would influence the future of the business.

03Challenge

Luxury travel is a field in which a good first impression is paramount. Therefore, a splendid, intricate design is mandatory. Its user-friendliness is just as important.

We're not only operating on a tight deadline in a galloping industry, but we're also facing a complex technical challenge. One of the main unique selling points will be the exhaustive catalog of available luxury destinations displayed on the website. High availability and good performance are the two pillars on top of which we aim to build our platform.

04Experience

The result is a state-of-the-art, online, luxury villa booking platform where esthetic and functionality go hand in hand.

The visual experience is a perfect blend of day-dreaming-inducing photography, meaningful iconography, and well-thought user journeys. The stunning imagery, comprising luxurious destinations and breath-taking landscapes, is accompanied by a well-taught and elegant identity design.

The property search flow is the heart of the application, and assumably, the area in which the visitors will spend most of their time, looking for the perfect destination. The search panel comes with an extensive toolset to aid the user find the perfect villa.

Our visitor's time is precious. Therefore, the website provides visitors with mindfully crafted user journeys and powerful navigation systems to ensure short and satisfactory search sessions.

05brand

The Travel Keys business already has a strong brand image. Still, we managed to find several places where we could step in and steer the overall image in a better direction.

We updated the color palette to allow us to better create semantic color schemas for rich user interactions.

The logo has been revised and enhanced, while the typography got a complete overhaul.

06Technology

One of the more complex technical challenges arose from a large amount of data the application consumed from several providers. This prompts us to pay more careful attention to correctly fit the necessary communication channels between consumers and producers with better reliability and security.

07front-end

In our experience, quality micro-interactions along with correctly timed, smooth animations are some of the key points to creating a memorable user experience.

We used Stylus as our CSS pre-compiler flavor of choice, accessible HTML5, and vanilla ES6 JavaScript sprinkled with Vue.js for interaction-intensive features, such as the search widgets.

08back-end

Phalcon's C language extension for PHP along with its MVC architecture enabled our developers to build a highly performant backbone for our application.

09mobile

The main challenge was to port the complex villa search capabilities to smaller screens without sacrificing any of the critical functionality. The result is a reimagined mobile experience for the villa search, custom-tailored for mobile users.

10outcomes

This was one of the better experiences I've had. I've done a lot of web projects before and this one was the easiest.

Conversion rates for the new site increased dramatically after launch. Though the project was complex, they offered good value and eliminated pain points.

Results: improved brand awareness, reduced costs, increased new business opportunities. Real-time unit availability across multiple property management systems. More fluid and efficient experience for customers. Increased website traffic.