BASSETERRE, St. Kitts – The award-winning St. Kitts Tourism website, www.stkittstourism.kn, continues to develop a state of the art site visitor experience through dynamic site navigation, search efficiency and simple means for direct engagement with the brand.
Most recently, it has been enhanced with a LiveChat interface that allows visitors to communicate directly with officers of the St. Kitts Tourism Authority and with an easy-to-use, direct online booking platform via the JackRabbit innovative BookDirect™ Search Engine.
“It is imperative to keep ahead of the curve in today’s evolving technological environment,” said Senator Ricky Skerritt, Minister of Tourism & International Transport. “The adoption of these two new website services allows us to provide more benefits to the consumers as well as to our local tourism suppliers.”
The LiveChat interface is a forum for website visitors to ask questions and receive answers about the destination in real time. It provides chat windows on every page of the website that allow visitors to simply type in their names and e-mail addresses to start chatting with a tourism officer.
The website has also been designed to allow officers of the St. Kitts Tourism Authority to monitor the pages visitors click on, see their time spent on each page and engage them if a visitor is spending more time in any particular section. The officer can then use this information to offer more personalized support and direct the visitor to accurate tourism information.
JackRabbit Systems enhances the consumer booking experience and is expected to increase St. Kitts’ hotel reservations. The BookDirect™ Search Engine allows visitors to enter travel dates to view rates and availability from participating properties on St. Kitts, then book their accommodations directly with their selected property. By linking consumers directly to properties to complete their room reservations, the BookDirect™ search engine optimizes the consumer booking experience and leaves the most profit with the lodgings.
The St. Kitts Tourism website is showing strong growth in a number of key areas as compared to last year, with website traffic for January 2013 having exceeded 100,000 visitors in a 30-day period, reaching its highest level to date.
Created by Tambourine, a Florida-based marketing agency, the redesigned St. Kitts website launched in 2011 as the centerpiece of the island’s new branding. This redesigned site included a new content management system wherein individual stakeholders could manipulate their own listings.
Later that year, the new branding and website received a prestigious Platinum Award in the digital marketing category from HSMAI (Hospitality Sales & Marketing Association International).
