PRODUCT
A NEED
REELING IN THE BOOKINGS
THE SOLUTION
THE RESULT
Therapy Charters resides on the docks of Bridgetown, Barbados offering a range of fishing and swimming experiences. With excellent fishing grounds, ship-wreck snorkelling, and turtles just a short ride away, Therapy Charters provide amazing flexible itineraries for groups visiting Barbados. Fishing and snorkelling, however, are highly competitive activities in Barbados - with many variations on the theme offered at different price points, different experience levels, and more. As a result, Therapy Charters was struggling to stand out from the crowd - and over-reliant on OTA bookings as a result. Therapy Charters saw a 116% increase in direct bookings in their first year with Holibob.
Having started out business five years ago - it didn’t take long for the 5-star reviews to start streaming in. It was clear the variety of experiences, friendly Barbadian hospitality, and stunning natural surroundings were a hit with the seasoned deep-sea fisherman and first-time anglers alike. Despite having great reviews on Facebook and TripAdvisor, Therapy Charters were struggling to drive direct bookings. At the time, direct bookings were only making up a small fraction of their business. Why? That’s what we set out to discover.
The minute we met the Therapy Charters team, one thing was clear: They approach every day with joy and a love for sharing their island and its surrounding waters with guests. This friendly, welcoming approach was something we felt they could build on to start capturing more bookings directly and reduce their reliance on OTAs.
The next thing we did was analyze their web traffic - drilling down to how people did (or didn’t) move through the site - to determine what changes would be necessary to increase conversion. What we saw was the need for greater simplicity in the company’s product offerings in order to ease the decision-making burden on potential customers.
Prior to Holibob, the charter business had tried multiple times to develop a compelling site, but to little success. What they were left with was a confusing site with an extensive range of fishing and snorkelling experiences. There were about 16 ‘products’ in all - though the majority were simply permutations of one another. The result was that many consumers spent too long on the site looking at different options, unsure if they had found the perfect experience for them, and leaving the site without booking.
By homing in on Therapy Charters' unique value proposition and then working with the team to reduce the number of products, we were able to significantly simplify site navigation and reduce the number of variations for consumers to browse through whilst exploring. We utilised the Peek check-out flow to boost their site for conversion, enabling site visitors to choose modifications of standard experiences (like duration,) as part of the checkout flow, leading to a much-improved purchasing experience.
“We have seen a higher rate of hits from our new website than we ever have before in our company's 5 years of operations. Some days in the past few weeks Leisa has been very overwhelmed with calls directly and operating the business with converted business.” - Andrew King, owner of Therapy Charters
“I was looking for a solution to put all of the locations under one website and I wanted all the marketing to be handled by one company.”
"Partnering with Holibob offers us a fast, easy way to expand that offering, adding world-class ‘things to do’ with little-to-no technical implementation on our side thanks to Holibob’s turnkey solution.”