Pontins

Pontin’s is a British holiday company founded in 1946. It specialises in offering half-board and self-catering holidays with regular entertainment on offer.

Our brief was to redevelop the main website and six resort sites with a single user friendly content management system that would allow easy manageability of the current Pontin’s website and individual centre websites whilst maintaining brand continuity.

Read the full case study

Our Response

The most important factor for Pontin’s customers is value for money. Consequently, Pontin’s is constantly updating all its UK sites with the latest packages and offers. Soap implemented an easy-to-use centralised admin area for all its UK sites. This allowed marketing staff not only to update offers with text images and pricing information, but also to add more interactive Flash presentations and video. Tiered admin privileges were also set up for each centre so the ‘Bluecoats’ could maintain blog entries for each centre.

Whilst building the site, a huge number of technical considerations had to be implemented for search engine optimisation purposes. We had to ensure that we not only improved rankings going forward, but that we also made sure we did not lose any positioning they had already achieved.

Working with the Pontin’s internal web team, we helped develop a strategy to refresh the current site to bring additional content and marketing function. Part of this strategy was to migrate the custom CMS to WordPress, empowering the internal team to take control of not just the content onsite but also marketing tools for time-sensitive offers and affiliate-specific landing pages.

Created custom plugins to link into the pricing and booking engine
Created custom tools to allow it to manage content sliders, break offers and affiliate-specific landing pages.
Multi-rolled system that allows some staff to ‘contribute’ while other staff ‘approve’

We have also done additional work for Pontin’s including brochures, Flash banners and email creatives.

The Result

Pontin’s is heading for its most successful year ever. Last year, Pontin’s made £3.5m on sales of £55m. This year, its expect to pull in £5m, the majority of which is booked through its website.

What They Say

Soap Media have been a breath of fresh air over the last 3 years. Always going above and beyond the call of duty the level of service we have received has been outstanding. Soap have brought a unique perspective and skill set, transforming our website and content management system to become a working toolkit for our team to roll out new content quicker more efficiently then ever before. We will continue to work with Soap for many years to come I am sure.