Hays Travel is the UK's largest independent travel agent, with over 450 branches nationwide and a workforce of more than 4,500 people. Following the collapse of Thomas Cook in 2019 — in which Hays Travel acquired all 555 former Thomas Cook retail shops overnight — the business underwent rapid expansion that exposed the limitations of its existing digital infrastructure. The project brief was a ground-up redesign of the consumer website and an entirely new CMS platform to support the newly scaled operation.
The central challenge was designing a system that could serve two distinct audiences simultaneously: consumers browsing and booking holidays online, and a large internal workforce of travel agents who needed efficient back-office tools. A single CMS had to power both, at scale, across hundreds of branch locations.
The design approach prioritised clarity and speed — reducing the number of steps required to complete a booking, surfacing the right content at the right point in the purchase journey, and building a component system flexible enough to be managed by non-technical staff across the branch network without breaking the design.
The process began with an audit of the existing site and competitor landscape, followed by stakeholder workshops with the Hays Travel marketing, technology and branch operations teams. User research sessions were conducted with both customers and branch staff to identify friction points in the current booking journey.
Lo-fi wireframes were tested iteratively before moving to high-fidelity prototypes, with particular attention paid to the search and filter experience — historically one of the highest drop-off points. The CMS was designed in parallel, with content editors involved throughout to ensure the authoring experience matched the complexity of the output without overwhelming non-technical users.
The redesigned platform launched to widespread positive feedback from both customers and internal teams. The project was recognised as a significant digital transformation for the UK's independent travel sector and cited as a key enabler of Hays Travel's rapid post-Thomas Cook expansion.
