Background
This customer is the largest travel agency franchisor in North America, with over 7,000 system-wide full-service and client-dedicated franchised locations that produce annual sales of approximately $17 billion. This franchise has been named the top travel business franchisor in Entrepreneur’s Franchise 500 for the past 19 years.
From promotions to featured travel agents to enticing landing pages to highlighting hot vacation destinations, this travel franchise believes in the power of content, using it to connect customers with travel agents. The travel business is fiercely competitive, and fresh content can go a long way towards making travel franchisees stand out from the crowd. When the time came to replace its old, obsolete CMS platform, this major travel franchise began the search for a suitable successor.
Out with the Old, In with the New
More than just replacing the CMS system, this major travel franchise was looking to upgrade the entire web experience for its franchisees and end customers. Many franchisees weren’t participating in company-wide marketing initiatives due to the cumbersome, difficult nature of the current platform - and the franchise sought to change that.
The franchise was looking to keep franchisees engaged and able to continually update their web presence - with fresh content and additional capabilities. The ability to manage content from a headquarters perspective and push it down to the franchisee sites for them to localize and customize would play an important role in achieving this goal.
Additionally, the franchise required seamless integration with the corporate CRM, marketing and back-end systems with its CMS, as lead generation is paramount to a travel agent’s success.