Rebuilding the front door of an iconic brand

How would you evolve a 26yr old brand to excite new and existing customers, rebuild a front-end infrastructure, and protect the business' earned revenue?

Before any visual decision landed, I aligned a risk plan across functions. With Data and Analytics, pre and post-launch tracking executives could read honestly. With Marketing Performance, success framed as a suite of metrics, not a single number, no one metric tells the truth about a brand change. With engineering, a config-level switch that could revert the experience instantly if a key metric moved the wrong way.

I pitched the strategy, migration path and risks to executive leadership via a RAID framework, so sign-off came knowing the change would be measured, monitored and reversible.

Ambitious, without being reckless.

A modular structure giving each travel vertical its own CMS-managed homepage, compliance designed in from the start, not bolted on at QA. Front-end literacy meant I made the architectural calls alongside engineering, not after them, so the rebrand could be ambitious without quietly costing the business.

Each vertical could now run its own campaigns at pace without engineering bottlenecks and partner integrations got their own surface area. A better tracking layer, an A/B testing framework and always-on Hotjar capture went in alongside and a qualitative study with real users validated comprehension and navigation before we called the rollout a success.

The pressures were real. Brand wanted bold change, engineering wanted minimal disruption, commercial wanted zero funnel impact, compliance needed regulated pricing intact. The job wasn't averaging those into the lowest common denominator, it was finding the structural answer that gave each function what it actually needed.

We also explored a highly engaging, minimalist UI direction. However, we determined it introduced too much immediate risk to the core user journey and exercising the judgment to shelve it for a future phase rather than impact the baseline conversion rate.

Our early explorations aimed at tackling a specific behavioural problem, the data showed terrible click-through rates on non-flight products because they sat outside the primary zone.

We solved this by reconfiguring the layout, pulling the wider product ecosystem directly into the user's eye-line alongside the core search widget. To balance this structural shift with emotional resonance, we anchored the page with high-impact video to establish a premium, internally-owned hero space with a strict zero-cross-branding.