In this article, we look at AITO Agents, which presents a unique challenge to us: How do you graphically differentiate between, on the one hand, a large travel agent that offers lots of different types of holidays in different destinations and, on the other hand, an association that represents many travel agents, who collectively can offer hundreds of destinations and thousands of holiday ideas?

Our answer might not be to everyone’s personal tastes, but this is a classic graphic challenge. 

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Both a well stocked travel agency and an association of travel agents can, in essence, offer a visitor a wide variety of holiday ideas in lots of destinations but, from a marketing point of view, the agency is looking to sell its own holidays while, the association is looking to promote each of its member agents.

So, from a graphics point of view, the question is how does one differentiate between the two? 

As you can see from screen-capture of the current homepage (on the left), the site graphically does very little in the way to suggest that it is different from a standard holiday website. There’s a big “Talk to the Specialists” text, but that could mean they’re specialists in holidays, rather than a collection of niche travel agents. Likewise, there is no graphical indication on the homepage that there is a great deal of variety possible from the many travel agents represented by the site. The only holiday graphic on the home page is randomly generated from a selection (distant cruise ship, lions, statues or cyclists), and can be confusing when combined with the slightly unclear message elsewhere on the page.  From the home page presentation, it’s entirely possible a visitor to the site could conclude that they’d arrived on a website specialising in cruises, safaris or cycling – depending on the image displayed!

So, how would we suggest changing it? After some brainstorming, we came up with the following concept (below). As you can see, it’s completely changed, so we have some explaining to do!

At the top of the page, we thought it important to show exactly what AITO Agents are all about by making a statement to that effect. By stating “153 Specialist Travel Agents”, “100s of Holiday Destinations” and “1000s of Exciting Holiday Ideas” just underneath the top banner, we’re immediately stating in no uncertain terms that the site is a collection of niche travel agents (not to be compared with the Thomsons and First Choice’s of this world) and offer lots of holiday ideas in lots of destinations!

The next area we tackled was backing this initial statement up with clear graphic portrayal of the huge choice of holiday inspirations that these experts can provide.  We decided that the best way of doing that was listing a random selection of holiday ideas, accompanied by the number of agents offering each. This would clearly show the sheer volume of niche holiday operators who can offer these holidays to visitors. It also has the added bonus of providing some much needed inspiration for visitors by offering holiday suggestions immediately on the home page.

As I stated, this graphic solution might not be to everyone’s personal tastes and is a strong shift away from the style currently on the AITO Agents page. However, whether you like our design or not, it should promote the idea that the role of the graphic designer is far more important than just selecting whether a website should be red or blue!

Another responsibility we place on our graphic artist is making the navigation work to the benefit of visitors to the site, rather than against them.  While there is nothing necessarily wrong with the current navigation (it isn’t confusing and it’s logically laid out), we feel that it could do much better with regards to improving site conversion.

Currently, from the home page, you can select your choice of holiday or destination from a drop-down, which is fine for those who know exactly what they want, but to us one of the major features of the site should be to inspire readers with a plethora of ideas and possibilities. After all, if the majority of customers know with a degree of certainty that they want to scuba dive in Australia, the chances are they will have already gone elsewhere via Google.  To be fair, AITO Agents have tried to inspire their visitors with an “Inspiration” button, but this only brings up a dry list of text offers from various companies – about as far away from being inspiring as you can get!

While we feel that we have already provided a graphic concept for inspiring visitors we wanted to take this a little further by making it easier for people to get inspired while searching too. We kept the destination drop box, but added a blank field where people can type in a selection of the activities that interest them – but, for those with less imagination, we’ve provided an option where people can click on suggestions, like scuba diving, theme parks and zoo trips to make them consider options they may previously not have thought of.

Lastly, as you will see we have also added in an optional post code field, which will enable visitors to find local agents for their desired holiday.  We added this in as there are still enough people who feel uncomfortable booking their holidays over the internet and prefer the option to actually drop into a local store and speak to real people.   For many agents, this local, face-to-face approach is still one of their real strengths and we feel that the site should promote this for the benefit of AiTO Agents members.

If you would like to volunteer your site up for assessment in our upcoming newsletters, please contact us on marketing@leadgenerators.co.uk