Sportsbreaks.com provides sports travel experiences to the world’s most exciting sporting events, including the Formula 1 Grand Prix, Wimbledon, La Liga, Serie A and Primeira Liga games, as well as world-class UK Rugby Union games and UK football match breaks.
Their offering includes tickets, travel and accommodation or a variety of combinations thereof, looking after transfers, itineraries or even bespoke, tailor-made packages for the most avid of sports fans.
Problem
Time was of the essence for Sportsbreaks.com to rebuild their market presence and have a system in place that formed the engine room of the business. There were two options available for Sportsbreaks.com with regards to the system: purchase the rights to use the existing Thomas Cook Sports booking system; or build something brand new.
The company is the consumer brand of Clarity Sport and launched in December 2019 following the collapse of Thomas Cook in October of the same year. GAIN LINE had already closely worked with the Thomas Cook Sport leadership team for many years, developing a successful website and bespoke booking platform, before they joined Clarity Travel and created Clarity Sports.
It was critical that the newly formed business maintained the relationships that were held with the existing clubs and a major part of this was the continuity of the bespoke booking platform that GAIN LINE had originally created.
Solution
GAIN LINE and the WilsonCooke team had worked with the TCS team for 15 years and, in that time, had created the booking system upon which we iterated and maintained. To build a new platform that was born out of such a long relationship was not viable due to the urgency to launch the new business. Our Managing Director, Mark Law, personally negotiated the purchase of the usage rights in order to secure the existing system which guaranteed a fast launch for Sportsbreaks.com and thus continuity of service.
Results
- The system is the engine room of the business and without it, there would be no business
- The speed to market saved them from having to rebuild a booking system tailored to Sportsbreaks.com’s unique requirements
- There is no such booking system on the market and so Sportsbreaks.com’s competitive advantage over other operators is protected
- The speed of the relaunch allowed for 25+ new partnerships to be created and launched across multiple sports including football, cricket, rugby union, netball and cycling
- The relaunch enabled Sportsbreaks.com to be the Official Supporter Travel partner for two European Finals in May 2021 with majority of bookings facilitated online
Project Team
Who worked on this project?
Kevin Williams
Technical Director
Mike Wildhood
Project Manager
Adam Faux
Senior Front-End Developer
Jonathon MacGregor
Senior PHP Developer
“Over the last two years, we’ve seen tangible growth on a scale that we weren’t anticipating and we are in a place we didn’t think we would get to thanks to the collaborative way of working with GAIN LINE and ourselves.
The bespoke booking system we have is a huge advantage to us, enabling us to be up and running much quicker than we originally thought possible”.
Rob Slawson
Sportsbreak.com
