Objective – to revolutionise the UK travel agent experience and deliver an online driven/ connected retail concept that makes shopping for a holiday fun.
My role – I led the Holiday Design Store (HDS) project from inception, strategy and business case, to design, technological development, training, delivery and promotion; engaging people around the business to help deliver the end result, but with only one IT project manager fully assigned to the job.
Note: I worked with 2020 to design the concept and Omnifi who developed the required software.
Solution – The Holiday Design Store (HDS) project was my vision of modernising the travel agent experience alongside TUI’s web, airline and holiday products, delivering a consistent branded experience which digitally enables people to deliver exceptional service. The aim was to make the travel agent experience relevant again in a time of unprecedented change in UK retailing (2013). The store brought together learning on integrating technology and using this to enable people (human technology) in a sector that was viewed as archaic by the city.
Outcome – Concept delivered in Oct-13 and Year 1 performance exceeded expectations on all metrics (sales up, discount down, ancillary sales up, margin up) – in 2014 Bluewater was highest volume shop for TUI in Europe and the concept was rolled out to 30 stores that year. It was highlighted as “one of the top 13 concepts of 2013” by Retail Focus magazine and won numerous awards, including BT Retail Week Digital Store of the year 2014 & dba Design Effectiveness Award 2015.