BANC launches innovative travel marketing plugin Pontoon

Manchester-based digital marketing agency BANC have unveiled Pontoon, a new travel marketing plugin that gives travel businesses the power to filter, sort and display third party travel content across their websites.

Created in collaboration with travel content software platform Widgety, Pontoon’s impressive features lets travel agents streamline the customer journey as users progress from initial website visit to booking their next cruise holiday. A long-standing authority in the travel marketing arena, BANC have worked with the likes of Scenic, Emerald Waterways and Cruise1st in their 17-year history, optimising their performance through a range of strategy-led website revamps, organic activity and paid media tactics.

Pontoon is a logical extension of the knowledge and expertise the agency has honed in that time, showing not only technical innovation on the part of its dev team, but an awareness of the issues and challenges that many travel businesses face with third-party travel content.

For BANC, while the Widgety platform was already a rich and valuable content source, the agency recognised an opportunity to help customers make fuller use of that content within their own websites, with greater flexibility, customisation and ease of integration.

Pontoon is a plugin that streamlines this integration of third-party travel content by making it easier to display itinerary info across a website’s key pages. Itineraries can be customised to fit a brand’s tone of voice and visual branding, bespoke pages can be automatically generated to eliminate inefficient processes and, by working with existing CRM or booking systems, lets agents drive the purchase journey more effectively towards completion. It’s scalable, SEO-friendly (a feature BANC say similar implementations lack) and doesn’t require deep web development knowledge to use it, a blessing for businesses relying on dev teams to carry out changes for them. With all of these features and benefits to its name, Pontoon is a testament to a team driving innovation across the industry.

And travel brands are already benefitting from it. “One of the biggest issues of our old site was that customers had to book and pay through a third party,” says Rachel Kemp of Hebridean Island Cruises, “which affected things from both a journey and brand perspective. “With Pontoon’s features, we were able to sync Widgety itineraries with our Resco booking system, something that’s made our booking and payment processes far smoother than they used to be. Our customers in different time zones can now book their next Hebridean adventure without the need for our sales team to manually assist them.”

For more information on how to get started with Pontoon, head to their website or get in touch with BANC here.