Largo Travel

E-commerce

Summary

Largo is specialised in luxury holiday resorts with an emphasis on tranquility and space. With a number of stylish, high-end resorts on the Dutch coast and an exclusive range of dream villas at top locations in the world, the goal of Largo is to provide people with a full service experience, based on personal wishes and preferences.

Case description

Largo - the premium label of the Roompot group - distinguishes itself by offering luxury holidays that completely relieves their guests. With a number of stylish, high-end resorts on the North Sea coast and an exclusive range of dream villas at top locations around the world, Largo has the goal of giving customers a complete experience that fits their personal wishes and preferences. That is why all Largo’s houses are furnished by interior stylists and have a digital host. Largo can do the shopping for you and, if desired, even a nanny service is available

At Largo you do not just book a vacation, but an experience. This idea has been translated on the digital platform into exclusive travel stories and a personal travel compass. Based on a number of questions, the travel compass suggests accommodations that are in line with the experience that the visitor is looking for.

A perfect blend of branding and commerce on their website helps Largo to further build their brand awareness and to claim a clear proposition in the dynamic travel industry.

Today’s digital environment is unpredictable. That is why the gathering of data and insights is built into the core of the platform, which feeds management and marketing dashboards. Also, we are experimenting with personalisation to make the customer experience even better.

*Technical specs*
- Drupal 8, headless
- React front-end
- Component based CMS setup for flexibility in content management
- Integration with Largo’s booking platform, synchronizing resorts, availabliltiy, prices, bookings and user data
- Digital Asset Management integration; all images are imported through Cloudinary DAM
- Email marketing tool integration for newsletter subscriptions
- Multilingual: Available in 3 languages
- Up to quality standards such as Performance, SEO, accessibility and GDPR compliance

Case goals and results

The first results are looking good. The brand awareness of Largo within their target audience grew from 5% in 2017 to 12% in Q1 2019. Also, Largo currently gets more bookings from its own website Largo.nl/LargoTravel.com, than from the website of its mother company Roompot which wasn't the case with their old website.

Challenges

1. Burst wasn’t just asked to build a website, we were asked to develop a totally new experience for Largo. This project included the creation of a new brand guide, including guidelines for design, photo & video usage, tone of voice, etc. Even in a very crowded industry with many competitors we think Largo really stands out from the crowd!

2. The platform needed to be fully integrated with Largo’s own booking platform. The integration needed to be real-time, as availability can change any minute. Resorts, availability, prices, bookings and user data are synchronised and always up-to-date.

Community contributions

The project is developed with our own headless Drupal 8 and React framework called Headless Ninja (HN). It is fully open sourced and consists of multiple smaller sub modules for easy extension and high performance. By also publishing the Javascript parts on NPM a headless React/Drupal website can be created instantly. More info on https://headless.ninja/.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/microloco
Microloco: An NPM module to support our multilingual frontends. A small translation module that supports variables and plurals, while still being easy to extend. An even smaller module will be available soon, called Nanoloco

Besides this we always raise issues if we come across them and submitted patches where we can. Examples:.
https://github.com/jaredpalmer/razzle/pull/888
https://github.com/ctrlplusb/react-tree-walker/issues/38
https://github.com/ctrlplusb/react-tree-walker/pull/39
https://www.drupal.org/project/webform/issues/3001141

Why should this case win the splash awards?

This case showcases that commerce websites can also be beautiful. The website is very innovative within the travel industry with an extreme focus on personal experience. Finally, the website is of high technical quality with complex integrations, such as the custom Largo booking software.

Case video