Project Overview
Go beyond the ordinary with Abercrombie & Kent's luxury travel website. Pioneering tailor-made and luxury holidays since 1962, Abercrombie & Kent have a wealth of knowledge of exotic locations and in crafting beautiful and bespoke travel experiences.
We continued our long-term partnership with Abercrombie & Kent following the decision to develop a new website in early 2015. Working collaboratively to design a striking website that highlights both the outstanding imagery and travel products, as well as meeting brand guidelines and requirements, the resulting website is a highly visual experience.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Design: WarrenEverard, Andrew Tesdorpf, Mack Nevill
Development: Thoai Nguyen, Mark Seddon, Kilian Lippa, Sean Bullock
Project Manager: Fiona Doherty
Digital Strategist: Anne Koch
Project Brief
Abercrombie & Kent is a global luxury travel company, with regionalised websites specific to each market. The AU website was dated, not responsive, and the client found managing the content challenging and restrictive.
We were tasked with taking the digital presence several steps forward, reinvigorating the brand and injecting a further level of luxury and exclusivity to the product offering.
The evolution of the previous website resulted in a complex and non-intuitive information architecture, making it challenging for users to locate content and journeys relevant to them; and included a confusing search interface. We were tasked with reworking the site structure, information architecture and content hierarchy, to allow users at various stages of the decision making process to explore, dream, discover and book their luxury holiday.
Project Innovation/Need
We collaborated with Abercrombie & Kent to refine and evolve the brand’s execution in a digital environment. The resulting visual language is both clearly part of the Abercrombie & Kent family, but also a considered and sophisticated progression of the brand.
Abercrombie & Kent have an extensive library of visual assets of outstanding quality, and we used these liberally throughout the site to draw the user into the rich experience each luxury tour offers. We structured the long scroll homepage around the three key sections of content, allowing the user to view a selection of content and then click to view more. A randomised display of the journey content on the homepage means that each visit reveals a different selection of private journeys.
Taking inspiration from luxury magazines, the initial section of the homepage is structured to provide a high degree of editability, allowing Abercrombie & Kent editorial control over the ‘theme’ of content surfaced each month with editors picks and a narrative introduction.
The My A&K feature was a new development for this project, providing a way for customers to create an account, favourite journeys, access insider information and curate their own wishlist of holidays.
Design Challenge
The key design challenge was delivering a unique and bespoke design within the constraints of a detailed global brand guideline. Abercrombie & Kent shared our vision for a striking website with immersive and generous use of imagery, and a refined execution, and collaborated with us to develop a visual language acceptable to guidelines whilst also allowing the website to assume a more sophisticated identity.
The development of the ‘My A&K’ account was a new feature for this website, and required consideration of a sub-brand with a complementary tone of voice and a design execution which reinforced the exclusivity and luxury of the A&K journeys. With refined typography atop a treated image of the A&K private jet, the identity of the sub-brand nods to the glamorous early era of air travel.
User Experience
The website is designed to support multiple pathways through content, and different ways that content can be surfaced. The homepage, with its magazine-editorial introduction, through the visual showcase of private journeys, and full-width call to action to join My A&K facilitates a user exploring, discovering and booking their ideal journey.
The journeys are the heart of the website content, and feature both a simple and a comprehensive search interface; the latter offering the user the ability to refine and filter their search by up to 8 characteristics of the hundreds of journeys available to book.
Each journey has a star allowing the My A&K user to save a journey to their favourites, and thus curate their own shortlist within their account dashboard. The combination of a refined and comprehensive search, and the My A&K wish list, results in a highly personalised experience for the user, making the Abercrombie & Kent website a destination for holiday dreams and luxury experiences.
Digital Experience - Website - Brand
This award celebrates innovation and creativity in design of a unique user experience in the combination of text, audio, still images, animation, video, and interactivity content for websites. Consideration given to clarity of communication and the matching information style to audience.
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