Cox & Kings
Rebuilding a 260-Year-Old Travel Brand for the Web
More Than a Website Refresh
Cox & Kings was returning with more than 260 years of recognition behind it, but also the uncertainty left by its 2019 closure. The new website therefore had two jobs: carry forward the credibility of the brand while signalling that this was a fundamentally new chapter.
And unlike an OTA, the experience couldn't be built purely around transactions. Cox & Kings was selling considered, often high-value journeys where trust, inspiration and access to human expertise mattered as much as getting someone to a booking screen.
Owning the Product Direction
I led the product design with one designer alongside me, working across product strategy, information architecture, core journeys and the design system.
Much of the work happened upstream of the interface: understanding where the existing experience was losing people, separating different travel and booking models, and deciding how inspiration, planning, expert assistance and booking should work together across one platform.
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.
Key Learnings
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.
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.
There’s more to the story than what’s on this page. Reach out at anjalidarbha.work@gmail.com if you’d like to see the full case study.
Designed at https://hyperlycheelabs.com