Rebuilding a 260-Year-Old Travel Brand for the Web
Turning a heritage travel company into a digital-first platform where browsing, planning and booking finally connect.
More Than a Website Refresh
Cox & Kings has been selling travel since 1758. Under new ownership, the company needed a digital platform that matched how people plan trips today.
The existing experience treated every visitor the same. Someone idly browsing destinations and someone ready to book a fixed departure saw identical pages. Group tours and flexible private tours, two genuinely different products for two different kinds of traveller, sat together in one undifferentiated catalogue.
Rather than continuing to build around hardware, Wagr saw an opportunity to become a digital-first petcare platform that could support pet parents through every stage of their journey.
The harder problem underneath was audience. The platform had to work for travellers who want to self-serve in ten minutes and travellers who won't commit until they've spoken to someone, without splitting into two products.
Owning the Product Direction
Beyond designing screens, we defined the product's role, prioritised opportunities and translated business goals into a clear direction the team could build against.
I led design end to end with one other product designer alongside me, covering competitive research, product and UX strategy, information architecture, every core flow, a scalable design system, and an annotated developer handoff carrying implementation detail, edge cases and product logic.
Understanding the Space
Before any screens, we mapped three things:
where the category was leaving room,
who we were actually designing for, and
what the brand could credibly promise.
The competitive gap
We looked across OTAs, curated platforms and luxury specialists, and the pattern was consistent.
OTAs own price, speed and self-serve tools, with no storytelling or brand depth and weak personalisation.
Curated platforms own customisation and peer reviews, but carry limited trust for high-value bookings and inconsistent recommendation quality.
Luxury specialists own narrative and high-touch service at a price point that doesn't scale for the Indian outbound market.
Everyone was strong at one end and weak at the other. Nobody held legacy trust and digital-first discovery at the same time, and that gap became the positioning.
Who we were designing for
Five traveller segments came out of the research, each arriving with a different anxiety.
Families with kids or teens, looking for age-inclusive trips and worried about hidden costs.
Groups of friends or colleagues, where the real problem is collective decision-making, not the trip itself.
Luxury travellers who can't tell one premium tour from another because nothing differentiates them.
Seniors, wanting visible accessibility, clear support, and reassurance that someone will pick up the phone.
Independent explorers travelling solo, wanting flexibility, safety and proof that people like them have done this.
The same pages had to answer all five without fragmenting into five products.
What the platform had to become
Those two threads pointed at four areas the brand could own: personalisation by traveller type, trust built into the interface rather than the marketing, community and social proof carried through the journey, and discovery flows that work for explorers who don't know where to go as well as deciders who are ready to book.
That left one question.
How might we craft flexible, trusted, and emotionally resonant travel experiences that adapt to today's diverse traveller needs?
flexible
Seamless discovery and hybrid planning. Destination-first, occasion-first or experience-first. Filters written the way travellers think, not the way the catalogue is organised. Instant booking, or an expert one tap away.
trusted
Certifications, tiered pricing and clear inclusions on the card, not three clicks in. After 2019, reassurance had to be structural rather than stated.
emotionally resonant
Community and storytelling. Narrative-led journeys instead of generic grids. Guides, experts and past travellers as voices of trust. Reviews attached to the day they describe.
diverse
Journeys tailored by traveller type, with age-specific inclusions surfaced rather than buried. Five segments arriving with five different fears, one platform.
our north stars
A platform that
reassures
through transparency, credibility markers and clear communication.
Designing for Scale
The hard challenge was making sure launch decisions didn't constrain what came next. Group and private tours share every page except the itinerary, because that's the only part that genuinely differs. Navigation, components, tokens and interaction patterns were built so new destinations and tour types ship without a redesign, with accessibility rules written into the system rather than checked at the end.
Key Learnings
Nobody starts from a blank page. People arrive mid-thought, with half a destination and a rough month in mind. Almost every screen improved once I stopped designing for a clean start.
Small information carries the weight. Departure calendars, cost breakdowns and document auto-fill did more for confidence than anything at the brand level. And heritage worked best as a credibility marker rather than the lead story, since 260 years reassures one audience and dates you to another.
Designed at https://hyperlycheelabs.com