Transun
Transun : Rebuilding an Arctic Specialist's Website and Booking Journey
With over forty years' experience specialising in once-in-a-lifetime tours of the Arctic, Transun knows the region inside out and has an unrivalled level of local knowledge. Its specially designed breaks take customers deep into the Arctic Circle to experience the spectacular, unique beauty of Lapland, from meeting Father Christmas and witnessing the Northern Lights, to Arctic activities such as snowmobiling and husky sledding.
This is ZOLV's third major rebuild for Transun in the last decade.
Challenge
Transun's website had gone essentially unrebuilt since 2016 - around ten years on the same legacy build. No documented design guidelines existed for the brand, a sign of how far the site had drifted without a consistent design system behind it. Crucially, analytics revealed a huge percentage of mobile traffic, yet the old site was poorly optimised for mobile responsiveness and lacked basic UX tools like on-site customer feedback surveys.
The booking journey itself was leaking customers: 73% of visitors abandoned at the very first stage of the booking process and improving the book flow was the number one priority for the rebuild. The site had also suffered multiple payment-flow outages, while post-booking management (Manage My Booking / MMB) had critical gaps — agents couldn't see included excursions due to Travelink data limitations, financials needed to be hidden from agent-booked clients, and manual, rule-based logic (like Santa wishlist cut-offs) stood in for functionality that should have been built in.
The sales team were working across a fragmented set of disconnected tools - Travelink for bookings, WTP for one-off resources, and marketing materials hosted separately, with no proper self-service agent portal.
The tech underpinning the project, WTP2.0, was also out of date and needed a full refresh. Alongside this, one of Transun's primary objectives for the redesign was a more modern look and feel, and together with their external designer, wanted the new site to reflect that.
Solution
As outlined in the primary project scope, ZOLV delivered a full site redesign and redevelopment of Transun's existing pages, executing a full content management system upgrade to the latest version of WTP (v4.9.0). Zolv reworked the booking journey, including a redeveloped accommodation and room-configuration flow, to address the abandonment identified in discovery. The new journey was explicitly designed to handle previously manual, rule-based logic such as automated Santa wishlist cut-offs, while updating the Manage My Booking portal to resolve excursion visibility and agent financial masking issues. The rebuild also upgraded Transun's Travelink integration and connected the site to Transun's new CRM (Inspiretec), replacing manual, inbox-based enquiry handling with a system built to capture and route data rather than lose it.
A heavily enhanced, mobile-responsive layout directly addressed the high volume of mobile traffic flagged in discovery. To tackle the agent experience, ZOLV delivered a dedicated agents website featuring secure logins, a tailored dashboard, news updates, and comprehensive training resources, alongside optimised cross-selling workflows for booking extras.
Results
The rebuild removed Transun's unsupported legacy tech stack and replaced it with an up-to-date CMS built on current best practice, backed by ZOLV's hosted management support. Simplifying the booking flow and introducing instant search/price-grid caching directly targeted the friction responsible for the site's booking abandonment, and the new CRM integration replaced a blind, manual enquiry process with one Transun can now track and act on.
Just as importantly for day-to-day operations, the rebuild massively reduced call volumes from agents - a direct result of removing friction from the customer booking journey.
From ZOLV's point of view, more important than any of the technical wins was retaining a client we've now worked with for over 10 years and still going strong.