Web design & development for Odyssey Travels

We’ve been working with the team at Odyssey Travel for almost a decade now, mostly on its search engine optimisation and email marketing campaigns, so when they asked us to help them update their brand across their growing suite of websites, we couldn’t resist the opportunity to talk holidays. 

It was clear from the off that there were big changes afoot for this luxury travel company: a new brand, new company structure, a growing team and, most importantly, more and more luxury holiday destinations to add to its existing repertoire. 

While the Odyssey team is more used to being the guide, our longstanding partnership meant that they trusted us to lead them through the next stage of their digital safari. They gave us free reign to start from scratch – just what we love doing – letting us set loose their website and brand into the wild. 

But first, we needed a brand that would be flexible enough to work across a dazzle, coalition, or crash of customer landing/entrance pages and calls to action. This was important – Odyssey’s roots lie in Tanzania, but, over the years, the company has grown to offer luxury safari and beach holidays right across southern Africa and the Indian Ocean. And further expansion is on the horizon. 

This natural evolution of the business had led to a series of websites all offering the same great service but with no consistency in look and feel. To add to the challenge, each site runs on a different content management platform and Odyssey did not want, or need, to change the system. For instance, the level of functionality required on its huge Africa Odyssey site – with multiple destinations, online itinerary access and blog – far outstrips that needed for its specific Mombo Camp microsite.

We agreed early on that a cookie-cutter approach would not work, but we did need each and every site to consistently reflect the brand and it all had to be fit for purpose and cost effective. 

How did we do it? With one common set of HTML templates that can be used across multiple platforms, we unleashed a cloud of beautiful, user-friendly websites designed to appeal to travel-lovers around the world. 

Those templates allow for both shared and one-off functionality. For instance, Mombo may not need Africa Odyssey’s online itinerary access, but both share our brand-new full HD video upgrade, giving prospective customers a truly immersive experience when they arrive on the site. Likewise, our HTML templates now ensure that each site is completely mobile responsive, adapting according to the device on which you are viewing it. 

And, since this is an established brand with incredibly high search engine authority, we needed to make sure that our changes protected that status. 

By standardising the ‘front-end’ code (which essentially builds the site your customers see and interact with), we were able to offer Odyssey a radical, yet cost-effective, user-friendly way of driving consistency across its growing brand. As a result, the team can continue to grow the business, choosing the platform that best suits each new site, safe in the knowledge that they have the tools to make sure that each one looks like a member of the Odyssey family.  It’s all left us feeling rather like a collective of lions.