The First Choice Holidays website was designed and developed by Nettec plc of London. Second Mile founder Cameron Clayton was contracted by Nettec to lead the front-end development of the website, in conjunction with Nettec’s in-house design team and application developers.
Nettec was acquired by Aspect Group in May 2003, who now manages the First Choice website.
First Choice is a leading European leisure travel company comprising mainstream and specialist tour operations, travel retail and aviation businesses. First Choice employs over 14,000 people, operating from 13 countries worldwide. In 2003, over 5 million holidaymakers chose to travel with a First Choice Group company.
First Choice Holidays, one of the leaders in European package holidays, and owner of their own airline, wanted to provide a cutting edge facility for customers to fully plan and purchase their custom-made package holidays online. In addition, they wanted the online store to compete with their chain of High Street stores in real time.
The user interface of the website had to be fast to download, and compatible with a large variety of browsers, from Netscape 3 through to the latest versions of Netscape, Internet Explorer & WebTV.
Scalability was of primary importance to First Choice. With around thirty companies and brands within the First Choice Group, their flag-ship First Choice Holidays website needed to be easily re-branded to be used with other selected members of the Group.
Nettec produced a ground-breaking, award-winning website for First Choice. They worked with First Choice and Anite (a reservation system provider) to create a fully transactional website based on a high performance Sun Microsystems™ platform, with an Oracle 8 database, using Allaire's Coldfusion web technologies and Spectra content management system software.
The site won first place at the Computer Weekly’s e-Business Design Awards. It was sited for “the outstanding use of e-business technologies to deliver content design that is attractive, user friendly, easily navigable and efficiently tied into back-office systems.” In addition, it was among the first sites to adopt the WebTV platform in the United Kingdom.
The First Choice Holidays website was successfully re-branded for use with the Group’s Air2000 and Unijet companies. This allowed these companies to fully utilise the back-end technology developed for the First Choice Holiday website, while maintaining their own brand identity.
The website already accounts for 3.5% of First Choice's total holiday business, and is so easy to use that 60% of site visitors make their bookings online, without needing to call First Choice's call centre – thus resulting in cost savings for First Choice.
First Choice is benefiting from having just one supplier to manage the entire solution. Graham Riddall, First Choice's Distribution Systems Manager, comments: "The 'Onestop - shop' approach provides a single point of contact for all support issues, and makes it very easy for us to know who to talk to about anything to do with running the website. Using a managed service provider to support the technology enables us to focus on our core function of selling holidays.
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