Since its inception Grabaseat has been the best performing Air New Zealand website in terms of hits and conversions. At a time when there were no really cheap flights, Grabaseat would sell distressed goods at bargain prices.
Each flight for an aircraft is a two leg journey. So, after the Narita - Auckland flight is complete, the plane has to get back to Japan. These flights would traditionally not be full. Grabaseat spotted an opportunity and advertised these heavily reduced seats. Massively successful, Grabaseat fills planes with passengers.
After two years of outstanding returns, both financially and in terms of great publicity, the business started working on expanding the revenue portfolio. We were adding more and more offers, Weekender deals, Rental cars, Reverse Auctions, cheaper flights further into the future... This meant neccessarily changing the page, primarily the Map.
One of the most recognisable AirNZ icons at the time - the map, looked great and functioned as a visual indicator when the user rolled over the listings to the left. Within the Grabaseat team the map as key the element of the brand, was highly emotive, but it took a large amount of real estate that the business wanted to use for selling additional services.
Small and inclusive steps were needed to morph the site format into one that could house many different campaigns, be more easily maintained and would be visually more apealing to the 70% female audience.
The site was also entirely built in flash, at a time when Flash was king, and we took an early decision to rebuild everything in HTML using CSS, Javascript and Jquery.
Making the functional areas visually self contained enabled the business to promote which ever part of the site needed focus.
The map was maintained in the branding, the colourway was made brighter and more neutral in the style of the time, which was shiney 2.0. The Grabaseat site has changed oner the years but the basic shape and look and feel has remained and is prospering.
