One of the key factors of any entrepreneurial success is an effective cooperation with specialists in the field. This is true also for the area of online services which simplify communication between business owners and their customers and help them sell products and services in the online world. Our specialists from ui42 who have been cooperating with specialists from FIRO-tour for almost eight years and are one of the shining examples of this phenomenon. Read further to see the extraordinary results of our exciting project.
From past to present
The first mission to accomplish, set on 07 September 2009, was to prepare graphic design for FIRO-tour’s website. On that day, the story of cooperation between ui42 and FIRO-tour started and on this day, it consists of more than 12 000 finished tasks.
The world of technology has been changing fast and it is of imperative importance to keep up with ever changing trends in the market. Keeping all this in mind, we decided to create the Premium website in April 2013. It is an ideal solution for FIRO-tour’s clients who prefer exclusive holiday destinations or tailor-made holidays.
We can’t forget to mention that everything has been built on our own CMS BUXUS, which we designed, programmed and have been upgrading continuously. You also might find it interesting to know that we started to develop the website on BUXUS 5.2.0, while at the moment we are working with CMS BUXUS 6.5.0. In the previous year, the company’s web design has been updated after user testing with eye tracking and you can find it’s final version on www.firotour.sk.
Results in numbers
After the successful launch of the redesigned FIRO-tour website in 2017, we noticed the first major decrease in page load time by 34.5% already in July and August.
The decrease in page load time was not our only success. The overall traffic increased by 35% and at the same time, we noticed the increase in numbers of unique visitors. The number increased by 31%. A major increase was spotted also in page views which increased by 50%. This was a very successful change which resulted in 35% increase in sales via mobile devices.
During our cooperation with FIRO-tour, we worked on many other interesting projects to make imports of tours, ski trips and many other types of holidays to various destinations from multiple Slovak, Czech and Austrian travel agencies onto FIRO-tour’s platform more efficient.
An undoubted success was also a micro-website named ‘School holiday’ which offers many tours and trips during the school holidays. You can book a holiday for a particular time when your children are off school with only one click and avoid a time-consuming search.
FIRO-tour wanted us to improve their additional services, so we decided to add more payment tools and presently, the FIRO-tour customers can pay using Cardpay, Sporopay, CSOBpay. Our main focus lies also on social media, which is a highly efficient tool for sale and advertisement. We managed to start a successful cooperation with FIRO-tour by creating their facebook fan page and holiday blogs online.
We would also like to mention our long-term know-how in PCC advertisement area, which we got a chance to utilise also during our cooperation with specialists from FIRO-tour. One of the interesting elements of this unique form of cooperation is that it involves provisions from sales. This model is also characterised by ad credit and freedom in budgeting and this means we are motivated as much as our client to make their website successful and profitable. The real challenge of the travel sector is the fact that the journey between thinking about going on holiday, opening the website for the first time and making the actual payment can take up to several months, so we are forced to use advanced analytics throughout the whole cycle. It is also important to address the discrepancy between the number of purchases and non-binding reservations. Even though the whole process might seem lengthy, we have been able to respond to new trends, explore new advertisement formats and allocate resources to areas with the highest potential.
Short recap and future challenges
Numbers are an important indicator for every business owner, so we will stick to them for a little bit longer. Let’s have a look at the current FIRO-tour website and its outputs that are interesting not only in comparison with its predecessor. The most interesting among them are some of the key year on year data:
- Overall website’s traffic increased by 35%.
- The travel agency’s orders increased by an incredible 140%.
- This was mirrored in 100% increase in company’s revenue
- Conversion rate, which is one of the most important indicators of online marketing’s efficiency, went up by 80%!
- Page Load Time went down by 30%.
- This resulted in the higher percentage of happy users (up 11%) and also more pages per session, which increased by 22%.
- And probably the most amazing finding was that in comparison to 2016, FIRO-tour registered increase in orders via mobile phones by 200%.
Marcel Siekel, CEO FIRO-tour: Long-term cooperation with ui42 is something truly amazing. We are so happy to have this experienced, flexible and reliable partner in this very important area of our online business. We are looking forward to our future projects and cooperation.
The results we have achieved fill us with pride and motivate us to take up further projects. Our current plan is to start cooperation with more travel agencies. We also hope that our new services will enable clients to book holidays offered by different travel agencies through FIRO-tour’s website in an easy and comfortable manner. We can’t wait to face new challenges and see our clients’ happiness.
