Hayes & Jarvis site redesign

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 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. This included diary studies capturing real-world holiday inspiration journeys over time, alongside in-depth interviews exploring how decisions form, shift, and sometimes stall completely.

A key “aha” insight emerged: finding the right holiday is less like using a search engine and more 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.

Inspiring tech providers

Alongside the design work, we also had to bring the wider ecosystem of technology suppliers on the journey. The ambition pushed the limits of existing capabilities, so alignment and motivation 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 as if it already existed. 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 set a new benchmark within Specialist Holidays Group for what a travel platform could be. Internally, it was recognised as the most ambitious and successful digital transformation the group had delivered.

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.