Friday, December 07, 2007

What to do with MyTravel.com

New Media Age today reports how Thomas Cook will redesign its main website in March next year.

Makes sense - especially with news that it will essentially merge its Thomas Cook TV and the website platforms so 17,000 hours of footage can be streamed online.

Exciting times...

However. What will it do with MyTravel.com? The site always performed pretty well in terms of traffic and has a page rank of 4 [same as the Travolution blog!].


But now in the shiny PLC world of Thomas Cook Group, MyTravel doesn't really exist.

What would you do?

Kevin May, editor, Travolution

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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Surely they wouldn't want to loose the traffic from the search engines and because of the brand a lot of people [myself included] just type in mytravel.com.

I'd therefore brand it in the new corporate style, and keep it as a separate site.

Andrew Girdwood said...

Here's a left field suggestion - keep the domain and turn the site into a corporate blog. It can be branded up as they like. One idea would be to match tags/labels to the various destinations on the old MyTravel site and get those 301 redirects in. We're looking to keep as much of the search traffic as possible but we're really talking about old links and bookmarks for a site like MyTravel.

Why the blog? Simply because of the My in MyTravel. It sets expectations.

What counts against this idea? If the group is dead set on killing the brand/memories as quickly as possible then this will not help. If they're set on killing the brand as quickly as possible then 301 redirects to the new uber-site are probably the only way forward.

Travolution Blogger said...

Andrew: I'll put this suggestion to the Thomas Cook Group as soon as possible!

Anonymous said...

If I was them I would be tempted to talk to their Nordic office about what they have done here:

http://www2.mytravel.dk/tango/tango-flash/index.html

I think it's rather good