#tucan travel #

Tucan Travel

“No other network comes close to Akamai’s global reach, which is critical when you’re serving customers around the world.”

Matt Gannan. CEO and Managing Director. Tucan Travel

The Situation

Founded in 1987, Tucan Travel is a specialist adventure company with offices in London, Sydney and Cuzco and operations in Thailand and South Africa. Voted best small tour operator of the year in 2009 by the British Travel Awards, Tucan Travel offers over 450 group tours, independent travel options and expedition cruises to 72 countries worldwide. First launched in 2000, the company’s website now serves an average of 100,000 visitors per month, and accounts for £2 million in online bookings annually.

The Challenge

Tucan Travel was challenged to serve an international customer base from its website hosted in Sydney, Australia. While site speed and user experience in Australia were good, overseas visitors – especially in the United Kingdom and Europe – suffered through 20-second load times for the main pages. Worse, they had to wait up to 40 seconds for a tour page that would take 5 seconds to load in Australia. “As consumers become more web savvy, they expect fast performance. Our customers, agents, and staff – particularly those in the UK – were complaining about download times,” explained Matt Gannan, CEO and Managing Director for Tucan Travel.

The Goals

Tucan Travel needed to meet three key requirements to support its objectives:

• Improve web performance:  To satisfy customers and agents, the company sought to ensure fast content and web application response times.
• Provide a consistent user experience:  Tucan Travel wanted all site visitors to have the same web experience, regardless of location.
• Avoid infrastructure build out:  With a limited technical team, the company did not want to add complexity to its content delivery infrastructure.

Why Akamai

Tapping into the Most Extensive Global Network

Tucan Travel evaluated its options, including deploying a mirrored site in the UK. However syncing issues, lack of suitable experience, and the costs of hosting in multiple locations made this an unattractive option. “We would have spent at least £20,000, plus ongoing maintenance costs,” says Gannan. Tucan Travel then turned to a content delivery network (CDN). After extensive research and testing, the company chose Akamai. “No other network comes close to Akamai’s global reach, which is critical when you’re serving customers around the world. Plus Akamai enabled us to maintain a single infrastructure while extending our capabilities,” continues Gannan.

Improving the Site Experience and Customer Satisfaction

As soon as Tucan Travel deployed the Akamai Dynamic Site Accelerator (DSA) solution, its site and web application speed improved dramatically at all locations around the globe. In fact, load times are nearly 400% faster. At the same time, Tucan Travel is handling a 300% increase in volume, though it has not expanded its content delivery infrastructure. “Whether our customers are accessing a tour page, or a search result, they’re experiencing fast performance. Losing customers to website performance is a thing of the past,” says Gannan.

Superior site and web application performance makes Tucan Travel customers want to return. “The number of monthly site visits has risen steadily. As site and web application performance has improved, people spend less time on the site, but view more pages. In other words, they can more quickly access the information they seek,” explains Gannan.

Extracting Full Value from a Cost-Effective Channel

In addition to improving customer satisfaction, better site and web application performance positively impacts agents who use the Tucan Travel site. Because the company relies on its website as a cost-efficient way to interact with thousands of agents around the world, it is committed to delivering a satisfactory web experience. “We haven’t received any complaints from agents about performance since implementing the Akamai solution,” says Gannan.

Planning Future Enhancements

With Akamai in place, Tucan Travel is anticipating future growth. The company plans to launch a new site with better navigation and integrated reservation and booking engines. “Though we’ve solved our performance issue, we want to improve our site navigation and add functionality. The combination of superior performance, navigation, reservation features, and accelerated online bookings will go a long way toward delivering the best online experience,” concludes CEO Matt Gannan.

About Tucan Travel®

Passionate about adventure travel since 1987, Tucan Travel offers 450+ exciting and affordable escorted group tours, plus a range of independent travel packages and Expedition Cruises to destinations worldwide, including Europe, the Middle East North Africa, Asia Russia, East Southern Africa, Latin America Antarctica. With six distinct travel styles offering varying levels of comfort, Tucan Travel has an adventure to suit people of all ages, cultures and fitness levels.