Maximum Adventure

Despite the impact of Covid-19, the website achieved impressive ROI in just six weeks. Maximum Adventure continues to receives bookings, with sales bouncing back to that of pre-pandemic levels thanks to the digital marketing efforts of the Fat Media team.

The project’s success has not gone unnoticed, picking up three awards in 2021: 

• Travel Website of the Year – UK Dev Awards
• Travel Website of the Year – UK Digital Growth Awards
• Global Travel and Tourism eCommerce Website of the Year – Global eCommerce Awards

We worked closely with the Maximum Adventure team to understand what their customers wanted and map out the key issues surrounding the websites user experience. We also identified an opportunity to improve the eCommerce platform by replacing the existing third-party booking system.

We removed the third-party application and integrated a booking system that works directly through the WooCommerce platform. Through extensive customisation of the platform, we made sure Maximum Adventure could access the functionality and flexibility that they needed to deliver an excellent booking experience.

This included building the functionality to apply deposit rules based on the dates specified in the booking, so that the customer always sees the correct payment plan for their trip.

We’ve also extended the checkout process from the standard WooCommerce workflow, to incorporate additional extras such as supplement for a private room over a dorm room, and a charitable donation option.

Early on, we realised there were clear issues surrounding user experience. To improve this, we implemented icons to give users a clear summary of the length, difficulty, and the activity type of each trip on the results page – helping customers see which are most relevant to them. On the details page, we implemented accordion displays to prevent information overload, while still presenting the deep level of detail all customers were seeking when planning their adventure.  

We also identified navigation as a clear user experience issue. To tackle this, we designed a new ‘burger’ menu that separates each customer group into sections.

Personalisation is a  must for eCommerce, especially when offering highly customisable products such as holiday packages. To make the user experience more personalised, we introduced clear signposting based on customer type, so adventure seekers can quickly and easily find the most relevant trips. We also re-structured the navigation and introduced specific landing pages for each customer type. This offered better search performance, presented the most relevant content in one place, and streamlined their booking journey.

Maximum Adventure’s previous CMS was very restrictive, causing editing issues and limiting the team’s capability to showcase the fantastic adventures that they have to offer. We replaced this with a far superior content management system, giving the team the flexibility to add and amend content without the need for development support. They also have excellent reporting functions for bookings and can export all customer data in one click; where previously they were cutting and pasting field after field in a very time-consuming, manual process.

Reflecting on statistics between June 1st 2021 and May 31st 2022, we have generated an extremely high return on investment for Maximum Adventure.

- Enquiries increased by 195%

- Bookings increased by 221%

- Organic bookings increased by 200%

- Sessions increased 92%

- Users increased 82%