Maintaining a useful website is quite a job for a travel company as Virgin Holiday will testify: it has recently reviewed and redesigned everyone one of its 20,000-odd web pages and restructured the navigation through the site.

Innovation is on the Virgin group’s stated brand values, so it is fitting that Virgin Holidays was one of the first companies on to the web, offering online booking at a time when many like Seek4travel.co.uk were just putting up static pages. Virgin Holidays was formed in 1985, a year after Virgin Atlantic Airways was launched as the group’s first venture outside music. Online sales are now a “significant” percentage of Virgin Holidays’ total although the company does not want to give a more precise figure than “less than half”.

Web development manager Steve Evan says: “For every Travel company now there’s more and more emphasis on the Internet to pick up bigger and bigger proportions of total sales, and we’re expanding our e-commerce department to support that” The huge number of web pages reflects the fact that Virgin Holidays produces 27 brochures a year covering products ranging from beach holidays in Florida to skiing in the Rockies, safaris in Africa, cruises on luxury liners in the Caribbean or sailing boats around the Great Barrier Reef and many more.

Web sales and promotions manager Vicki Smith says: “he brochure content is constantly updates on the website, which will always have the current information – and much more detail than you can put in a brochure. The website can show prices for both this year and next, for example, and details such as the fact that a hotel has added a swimming pool and the date opens.”

 

Such wealth of information and holiday options means a website has to be constantly under review, Smih says: “Over time, as a product range expands and develops, a website’s design and structure get tweaked as things are added, but at some point you have to start again and look at how to encompass all the evolving content.

“Our brand is important online and offline. You can’t underestimate its importance. For examples, it means a banner ad is instantly recognized because it’s right colour of red, before people even consciously look for information. And the connotations and perceptions of the brand, which go through all Virgin products, speak to consumers about what you are like and what your products are like.

“Consumers have expectations of Virgin, such as innovation and fun. We have to live up to these expectationsof Virgin, such as innovation and fun. We have to live up to these and take them into consideration when developing the website. The amount of content make this a bit tricky: there’s not much you can do to make information on baggage allowance fun.”

Virgin group founder Richard Branson is personally important here. Smith says: “The brand perceptions have come from his character. He’s popular among our loyal holiday makers, the Frequent Virgin Club. There are more than 110, 000 members, and many are keen to have more information about Richard.”

All Virgin companies are run independently – indeed some are joint ventures with third parties – but there are guidelines on issues around the use of the brand and the logo in particular. The guidelines include the distinctive shade of red and the amount of space to be left around the logo.

All this is overseen by group brand marketing director Ashley Stockwell and his team. “Companies have to stick to the brand and identity in all they do, not just on the web,” Stockwell says. “We leave specific site design and navigation up to them: we make no specific site design and navigation up to them: we make no specific rules – other than that their sites must comply with the Disability Discrimination Act.” Virgin’s attitude to the DDA is reflected in it’s response to a critical study in 2003 of travel company websites by charity AbilityNet, which advises disabled people, employers and other on IT.

Virgin Atlantic Airways on the only one to respond publicly, saying: “Virgin Atlantic is committed to providing the highest levels of customer service to all our passengers and we recognize we are currently in this area. We’d like to take this opportunity to apologise to any of our customers who have experienced difficulties in accessing our website.” The company went on to say that it had set up a programme of changes to make the site more accessible.

Evans says impaired users are a major consideration: “We strive to make the site accessible as possible. We’re proud of the program code behind our site: it’s been designed to meet as many international standards for accessibility as possible. The code is thoroughly checked and validated by an external agency to make sure it’s accessible to all types devices such as speaking screen readers.”

Smith says this is all part of Virgin Holidays’ general aim of providing access to holidays for impaired people: “We have a specialist group who deal with their bookings and help to meet all their specific requirements. It’s really important to us that all our products are accessible to everyone.”

Although Virgin Holidays and other Virgin companies operate independently, the group brand marketing team do control some aspects.

“Each company has a trademark license agreement that allows it to use the Virgin name,” Stockwell says. As part of this they are told that URLs they can or can’t use. I tends to depend on the territories they trade in: for example some only have the right to trade in the UK, so they can only use ‘.co.uk.”

This applies to Virgin Holidays a separate company in the US, Virgin Vacations, uses ‘.com’.

The Virgin.com site has promotional space that group companies can request. The top five companies in terms of visitors are also featured; Virgin Atlantic Airways, the Megastores entertainment shops, Money, Trains and Mobile price services. Visitors statistics are reviewed each week.

“The Virgin.com site is unusual in that most sites try to lure you in and get you to stay as long as possible we want to get you out as soon as possible, to a specific operating company site,” Stockwell says.

With 20,000 pages to browse on the Virgin Holidays site, most people will probably welcome this approach.