ANWB Reizen, a leading European travel agency had been focused on packaged travel. Over the last few years, they observed a shift in consumer behavior toward the need for more control, flexibility and certainty. In response, they enlisted IG&H’s help to create a new business model and value proposition to meet these needs while also helping them appeal to a younger demographic. This resulted in Reisopmaat (English custom travel). For IG&H, the first challenge was to prove the technical feasibility of such an innovative and disruptive solution.

Systematically addressing the unknown

IG&H’s Digital Experience team applied disciplined, yet highly iterative and explorative, development cycles to address the inherent “unknowns” in proving the technical and commercial viability of the concept. Together with ANWB, IG&H formed a small, multidisciplinary self-steering team with short decision lines and substantial autonomy.

The team used continuous customer research to validate and sharpen the uniqueness and desirability of the proposition. The Scrum methodology was applied to build and showcase results in bi-weekly demos and continuously release improvements to the live production environment.

To make the user experience as pleasant as possible, three types of research were conducted:

1. Proposition research included focus groups and in-depth interviews with people from different target groups. This highlighted that the main target audience wanted more flexibility than traditionally offered by pre-planned package trips, yet these users did not want to have to do everything themselves either

2. UX research as input for critical design decisions, for example about how travel inspiration is conveyed, e.g. with a sample trip, options to use filters, selecting the dates first, understanding the app’s general flow, etc.

3. Usability research to optimize what has been built. For example, whether a button stands out enough, or whether people can navigate through the app well.

During the customer research, travelers were divided into different groups. On one side of the spectrum, we identified the puzzlers, people who enjoy planning everything themselves. On the other side were the package people who value security and prefer having the trip organized for them.

In the middle, we found people who appreciate building blocks, such as the flight and hotel being booked while still having the option to make other additions or adjustments along the way. This group wants a degree of flexibility and likes to have more options to choose from. This building block segment turned out to be the group that would feel most inspired and empowered by Reisopmaat.

Low-code for a high-quality user experience

To accelerate the innovation, IG&H used the OutSystems low-code development platform. The team relied heavily on the platform’s ability to easily integrate with 3rd parties and existing back-end systems, and enable rapid feature development. Data science was applied in the form of a self-learning algorithm that analyzed hundreds of thousands of data points to make relevant recommendations to customers and continuously improve the application on the fly based on customer behavior.

Data & analytics was applied by gaining relevant insights all over the application to steer important decisions. This ranged from data-heavy analyses assessing the supplier’s quality to gaining a deep understanding of pain points along the entire customer journey. This resulted in a sound business strategy driven from an IT and operations standpoint where the customer’s point of view became central in the app.

Leveraging these key capabilities, IG&H was able to deliver an innovative travel e-commerce platform that provided a seamless customer experience and was truly unique and differentiating in the market.