STA Travel: STA's brave new world

The 30-year-old travel company specialises in student and youth travel, operating in more than 75 countries across 15 time zones. It has embraced web 2.0 in the past two years with fervour, launching widgets and applications, made its mark on Second Life and further enhanced its reputation among adventure-seeking young people by constantly developing applications to create anticipation and demand for travel. And all of it's been in the hands of global webmaster Hepburn.

A Scot, Hepburn was destined to follow his father into newspapers until he stumbled across the introduction of computer technology to the press cycle. Hepburn senior had worked at Scotland's Daily Record and Sunday Mail newspaper group, which latterly took over running the Scottish Daily Mirror. Hepburn junior joined his father as a copy boy.

"My dad was head of photography and the dark room," Hepburn says. "I got interested in Apple Macs, PCs and journalism and my dad wanted to try to push me into journalism, but I hated tabloid journalism. It was a dog-eat-dog world. Piers Morgan was my boss. I started to think, how can people do this? As circulation dropped, more and more risks were being taken to get the stories, but my dad kept saying, 'Journalism, son, that's the way to go'."

Hepburn preferred the technology side of the business and, on leaving school, announced to his father that he was going to study media. "That pleased him, but he didn't realise it was actually multimedia," Hepburn says.

It was the late 1990s, and Hepburn went to Glasgow College of Printing to study multimedia development. On graduation, he spent two years at Glasgow Caledonian University. "I had my own company on the side, called Craig's Web Solutions," he says. "We used to work for small companies and bars and restaurants. No-one really had email addresses, so I went in and sold them the benefits of having an email and a website. I learnt a lot by doing that."

In 2000, he arrived in London, having followed his heart and the dotcom buzz. When the dotcom bust hit, he joined Rentokil Initial in East Grinstead.

"It was good for me because I got involved in the whole usability side and how the front-end design could help the business," he says. "You wouldn't think Rentokil would be that active digitally but - because it is a service company - it is behind the scenes. It has people out on the road all the time, so it needed corporate directories, intranets, sales leads, phone call systems that went into back-end databases."

He left Rentokil in 2004 to join BAA for a year, heading its intranet and web team. He soon discovered that he wasn't a company man. "I found it quite difficult; it's very much a government-run organisation," he says. "I found it hard to get things done quickly. Because it's airports, security is a major issue, so everything was assessed on risk, rather than benefit. I'll be the first to admit that I hate processes."

In 2005, he joined STA Travel, to head up its Global Ecommerce Travel Strategy project, something he saw as an exciting step up. "When this role came up, it looked really interesting," he says. "I was going from running a UK-based internal web, email and intranet system to rolling out a corporate global ecommerce solution with a content management system. It was a challenge but one I looked forward to. My role was to head up the roll-out technology, which was the global content management system, working with the UK, Australia and US market."

Before Hepburn's arrival, STA Travel had relied on individual websites for each country. His role was to develop those websites and build on the existing applications, integrating a universal booking engine application, email applications and customer-service tools.

Hepburn admits the task was daunting. "A lot of the sites for STA Travel were legacy websites where stuff had been just plugged on and plugged on," he says.

He had to overcome a lack of consistency and compatibility between the various countries' websites. "Previously, it was very hard to roll out new technology or for even one country to get the best practice from another. The new system allowed us to have a platform with a shared look, feel and structure with brand guidelines, which allowed each country to manage their own content - in their language - so they could speak to their customers however they wanted."

Love at first site

The art of usability is key to STA Travel's experience. The websites are the first point of contact for most of its customers and, as such, they need to be right, Hepburn says. The aim of the revamp was to be able to update the web offering and roll out improvements such as new widgets across the wider company, while maintaining the local touch.

"Each country could still have control over its homepage and what deals and applications it wanted on there. But what a global CMS did was allow us to roll out some of the really cool cutting-edge technology, such as RSS feeds. The divisions can now manage their best products and offers on the site, and allow people to subscribe to them and share them on their Facebook or MySpace profiles. The global CMS also allowed us to develop global widgets, such as widgets for to-do lists and countdown timers to a departure date."

But Hepburn's role has not been a solo one. The digital revamp had the full support of the company, including its UK marketing director, Celia Pronto, who also joined the company two-and-a-half years ago. A traditional marketer with experience at Unilever, Pronto came to STA Travel from Intercontinental Hotels. "Digital is at the heart of what we do," she says. "When I joined, the marketing was fragmented. One of my challenges was bringing together the on- and offline aspects of the business."

A key part of the STA Travel experience is research. The company insists on its staff embracing the travel bug. All staff members have to pass an exam and have to have travelled to two different continents.

As a result, Hepburn wants to combine on- and offline marketing, getting customers to go from the websites to talking to STA's experienced branch staff. They advise travellers on the best places to go but also simplify the booking process. "We have Travel Advisors, where customers blog about their trips and update from around the world, but we also have the branch staff who can advise on where to go, for example, if you're in Vietnam, you have to go here. Stuff that's not in the tour guides."

STA has also used Facebook intelligently, not only developing widgets but also setting up a group that now boasts more than 20,000 members. Far from leapfrogging on to the Facebook cult, Hepburn believes the group is actually nurturing a community. "When you go on the web, it's great to have images and text, but what you miss is that conversation," he says.

"One of the good applications created in the US was Statravel193.com, based on there being 193 countries in the world. They've created a microsite with information that they pull from our feeds, MySpace and blogs. They've got maps and they sponsor people travelling, so that they're actually taking videos and blogging about it. So people subscribe to it and they run competitions, so it's about tapping into the whole excitement of travelling."

A recent study from Forrester Research showed that the numbers of people booking travel through the web was falling, mainly due to the rigid structure of website booking systems. Hepburn believes that part of the problem is usability. "I'm really passionate about usability," he says.

"Widgets may be cool and funky, but what value are they adding? The airlines have been at the forefront of using technology with their online booking systems, online ticket management and online customer service. Travel agents have tried to keep up but have so many different systems and operators. What's happening now is that people are getting frustrated.

"They can book really simple things, but they're not really getting the best service. If they're booking something of value, they want to speak to someone on the phone and say 'this is what I want'. The usability isn't good. So many applications or widgets just break or fail and that just gets people down. At some point, someone will decide 'I love all this information' but to join it up, I'm going to phone someone."

Virtual storefront

STA has also become a driving force in Second Life. It launched its presence in the virtual world in 2006, and now attracts more than 50 visitors a day (20 to 30 is considered respectable by a commercial island in Second Life). There are several 'gates' to the STA Travel world in Second Life: it's promoted through blogs and on the company's global network of websites.

By establishing itself as a virtual 'guide' for beginners, it greets newcomers and teaches them how to navigate the world and gives them a complimentary STA Travel T-shirt. In its virtual world, a Second Life branch manager - actually employed by the company - maintains the special offers and answers queries, taking users offline if they want to purchase a trip. A partnership with Lonely Planet has resulted in a weekly music quiz every Thursday, with guidebooks as prizes.

While Hepburn is enthusiastic about Second Life, he believes that it - like all social networks - will quickly be over taken.

"One of my focuses is that we don't buy too much into the Facebooks and MySpaces because people move on," he says. "What we need to focus on is building the content so that it can be incorporated into other applications. We shouldn't have to build especially for each application. A lot of my strategy is to allow the company to have the technology to deploy the content. I think Second Life is very much an early adopter."

Hepburn takes a lot of his inspiration from what Microsoft and Google are doing. "We did quite a bit of research on what the student generation is doing on MySpace or Facebook," he says. "If they're living on a certain platform, then we should be adopting it. We launched a Skinker, an operating system that you downloaded to your computer.

It was a great system but we thought we shouldn't stay with something that a lot of people weren't using. Even Facebook is basing its applications on what Microsoft, Google and Sun are trying to use together so that people can share applications. Otherwise, you've got to develop them four or five different times and people are reluctant to download for one site then download for another."

In his role as global webmaster, incorporating the trends in the 75 countries where STA Travel has a presence is complicated. "What we'll normally do is roll a new application out to the US and see what the take up is like," he says.

"If it really takes off, then we'll drip that through to the UK, then out to Europe. At the moment, Facebook is massive in the US, has just become big in the UK, but in Australia, it's big but not as big as in the other markets. In Germany, it's non-existent, because they haven't launched it there yet. So when we rolled our Facebook widget out and put 'add to Facebook' in our templates, Germany doesn't have it so we had to look at changing the social bookmarks on their sites. That's why we have this central panel that looks at what we have to do for the different markets."

Hepburn's next task is to embrace mobile. An evangelist for mobile marketing, the company is preparing a test project where users get free phone calls and texts if they accept STA advertising. "I've been hyping mobile for the past seven years," Hepburn says.

"We're going to do some stuff with Blyk around the student youth market, looking at giving people free phone calls and texts if they accept specific advertising from us. The one thing about mobile is that it has to add value. For example, I'm a big fan of Ibiza; I used to go every year. When they banned flyers, you used to go to Radio 1's website and sign up for its text update which told you where everyone was playing. It added value to your life. I think, though, there needs to be some way of stopping spam marketing on mobiles. And that might mean the Government getting involved."

CRAIG HEPBURN - CV
1998: Masters degree, Glasgow Caledonian University
2000: Intranet web manager, Rentokil
2004: Web developer/project team leader, BAA
2005: Global webmaster, STA Travel