Cain Travel: Modernizing the Website for a Travel Company

The Challenge

Cain Travel is a leading travel agency in Boulder, Colorado. While they provide traditional travel planning services for vacations and leisure, over the years their specializations evolved to focus largely on corporate travel and meeting/event coordination. Throughout that time, Cain Travel adapted to the latest technology — implementing a cutting-edge client portal to organize trips and countless other features to enable seamless oversight. While their technology greatly exceeded the industry standard, their travel agency website design continued to portray an outdated digital presence.

Our Approach

Cain’s travel agency website development process began with a comprehensive website strategy. We started by gathering data on their current platform, adding a heat mapping tool to identify what users interacted with most. Blennd’s SEO team ran a site audit to determine their site’s performance metrics and uncovered the highest value pages, spotted pitfalls that could affect their organic search, and gauged their overall site health. From those insights, we were able to provide data-driven recommendations to improve their user experience, optimize their pages, and increase the power of their digital platforms.

Once we had a solid understanding of the website’s needs from the backend, we were able to jump into the updated identity through our branding strategy sessions. The Blennd team worked with Cain Travel’s experts to identify the company’s core values and the direction their brand needed to go to reflect their current capabilities. We collaborated to build a map of how the brand should live, sound, and look to accurately represent Cain’s people, services, and technology.

Once we gathered the quantitative data from our heat mapping and auditing tools — and qualitative data from our subject matter experts on the Cain Travel team — we took that information and created a strategy for the project ahead. The research showed that Cain’s client support section was getting a ton of interaction, but it was located way down in the site footer. Their COVID-19 travel resources also earned a lot of attention — they frequently updated information for every airline and added the latest mandates to help their travelers. 

An additional key feature was HubSpot integration. The Cain team used the customer relationship management (CRM) tool for a lot of their internal processes and wanted to seamlessly utilize it through their platform — particularly for the contact form and blog. These insights and requirements played a pivotal role in the user journey mapping and travel agency website development. 

The user experience for Cain’s travel agency website design is centered around their primary personas  — those interested in corporate travel, meetings and events, and vacations and leisure. Above the fold on the homepage, the new website qualifies users immediately, allowing them to identify their intent and get more information on their desired service.

A full-page takeover navigation menu provides a more detailed breakdown of services. Meanwhile, the Client Support button is prominently displayed, providing resources for common customer inquiries and contact information for those that want to get in touch with the team directly. COVID-19 information displays as a notification bar, allowing users to easily navigate to the latest updates. Cain’s new strategy-driven design paved the way for efficient and effective travel agency website development.

Throughout the travel agency website development, the Blennd team utilized the website and brand strategy to build a highly effective user experience. With the integration of HubSpot, Cain’s customers could quickly submit a form and immediately transfer into their sales funnel. Internally, Cain’s team could add a blog post directly through their preferred CRM — boosting their website’s authority and in turn improving their SEO. Pre-launch, the Blennd team jumped into a thorough QA process, where design, development, and client teams sweep the site and identify any outstanding fixes. Finally, the SEO team performs an audit to uncover any invisible issues before the site goes live.