Hayes & Jarvis site redesign
Breaking down the barriers of rigid holiday searches
The challenge
Hayes & Jarvis needed a complete redesign that would break away from the rigid, form-led patterns that dominate most travel sites. Instead of forcing users into highly specific search preferences, the ambition was to create a more open experience that reflected how people actually think about holidays — fluidly, emotionally, and often without a fixed destination in mind.
This wasn’t a cosmetic refresh. SHG’s existing platform had been losing ground for two years: roughly one in five searches returned “no results,” searches routinely took 40+ seconds to return, and there was no meaningful way to filter or narrow down choices. Across a £578m business, that decline was costing real margin. H&J was chosen to go first because it had suffered the worst of the decline and leaned most heavily on retail distribution — the platform that most needed proving out before the rest of the group followed.
It was also the first UK implementation of a new flexible holiday search technology, introducing significant technical and integration complexity across search, content, and booking systems.
Getting to the core pain point
We began with generative research to deeply understand how people plan and dream about travel: diary studies capturing real-world holiday inspiration journeys over time, alongside in-depth interviews exploring how decisions form, shift, and sometimes stall completely. That research was synthesised into a full customer mental model spanning the entire journey — from first idea through to post-booking — mapping needs, barriers, and channel behaviour at every stage.
“Finding the right holiday is like searching through a keyhole.”
People rarely see the full landscape of options at once. Instead, they explore through fragments — a mood, a budget, a memory, a conversation, or a vague sense of “somewhere warm.”
This reframed the experience entirely. Rather than separating browse, search, and quote flows, we designed a single adaptive system that supports all three. Users could start with anything — a destination, a feeling, or nothing at all — and the experience would progressively reveal relevant options as intent evolved.
Validating and refining with real users
Before launch, the reframed experience was stress-tested over several rounds of user testing prototypes. The sessions surfaced genuine praise — the homepage video was “inspirational,” users responded well to Tripadvisor content sitting directly inside the site (“great that it’s actually within the website… never seen this before, it’s a time saver”) — alongside real problems: search results breaking when criteria were edited, and some keyword searches returning nothing at all.
Inspiring technology partners
Alongside the design work, we also had to bring the wider ecosystem of technology suppliers on the journey. The front-end search experience was sourced from Peakwork, a German search technology provider (itself a World Travel Market innovation award winner), while the underlying platform went through a rigorous build-vs-buy evaluation — including head-to-head performance benchmarking of two leading search/caching technologies, where the winning option delivered a full data refresh in 15 minutes against 5 hours for the alternative.
The ambition pushed the limits of existing capabilities, so alignment and motivation across suppliers were critical. We hosted a dedicated mini-conference with all key suppliers to introduce the vision, share emerging technology directions, and align on what would need to be built. We opened the event with a narrative walkthrough of the future experience — taking stakeholders step by step through the user journey to showcase the vision. This storytelling approach shifted the conversation from feasibility concerns to possibility, creating real momentum and buy-in across partners who left motivated to make the vision real.
The outcome
The redesigned Hayes & Jarvis experience launched in November 2013 and set a new benchmark within Specialist Holidays Group for what a travel platform could be — internally recognised as the most ambitious and successful digital transformation the group had delivered to that point. It was put forward for the national Innovation in Travel Award and covered in the trade press for the technology approach behind it.
It also acted as a catalyst for broader investment in experience-led design across the SHG portfolio, establishing a foundation for more flexible, user-led approaches to travel discovery and booking that later brands in the group would follow. The original business case had set a target of £4.4m in incremental margin over five years and £400K in paid-search cost savings — the scale of ambition the project was designed against, and the bar that made this worth doing properly rather than incrementally.
