Transforming Digital Luxury Experience: Aqua Expeditions’ Website Revamp Journey

Red Airship's partnership with Aqua Expeditions resulted in the latter's website revamping. The successful digital experience transformation earned Red Airship the finalist position at the first-ever Splash Awards Asia in the "corporate" category. That brings us our fourth finalist in The DropTimes "Splash Awards Finalists" series.

The Splash Awards will happen on December 9, 2024, at 5:15 PM in the Garden Ballroom at PARKROYAL Collection Marina Bay.

A global leader in luxury small-ship expeditions, Aqua Expeditions redefines experiential travel with tailor-made voyages to some of the world’s most biodiverse and culturally significant destinations aboard best-in-class vessels.

While Aqua Expedition delivers a luxurious onboard experience, their existing WordPress website was unable to echo the same level of sophistication, creating a misalignment between the brand’s onboard and online experiences. As the company continued to expand its offerings to remote destinations such as the Galapagos, Peruvian Amazon, East Indonesia, Indochina, and now East Africa, it became clear that the website needed to capture the elegance of the Aqua experience. Aqua Expeditions sought a platform to showcase their highly exclusive expeditions, improve engagement, and drive more bookings.

Aqua Expeditions partnered with Red Airship to craft a user-centric website that reflects the elegance and exclusivity of its onboard experiences. Built on Drupal, the platform integrates with Zoho CRM and Resco Cruise Reservation System to ensure a seamless end-to-end user experience, from exploration and research to booking.

The thoughtfully redesigned site delivers high-quality visuals and interactive storytelling that bring the brand’s destinations and ships to life. A streamlined booking flow simplifies the reservation process, while the website highlights Aqua Expeditions’ key brand pillars, including sustainability, acclaimed cuisine, contemporary design, personalized service, wildlife and adventure, and heritage and culture.  

The results were immediate: within 24 hours of the launch, the brand saw a significant uptick in online sales and revenue for the 6 months after launch increased by 25% compared to 2023, demonstrating the redesigned site’s effectiveness in driving business growth and elevating Aqua Expeditions’ digital presence.

Hanh Nguyen, Digital Marketing Manager of Aqua Expeditions, shared, 

“The new platform elegantly showcases the once-in-a-lifetime expeditions guests can expect to experience with Aqua and connects with our audience in a meaningful and authentic way.” 

Red Airship shares this pride, 

“This project pushed the boundaries of digital innovation in the luxury travel space, and the results speak for themselves.”

The journey wasn’t without challenges. Optimising high-quality visuals for performance requires advanced compression techniques to ensure load times do not compromise the user experience. Delivering consistent performance across devices posed another hurdle, addressed through rigorous testing and responsive design enhancements. These efforts ensured the site performs beautifully, no matter where travellers engage with it.

The project’s impact extends beyond Aqua Expeditions, empowering travellers to support sustainability efforts while contributing innovative tools to the Drupal community. Aqua Expeditions’ journeys fund initiatives like 4Ocean cleanups and conservation efforts, while plans to open-source integrations for Netlify-Slack tools, Zoho, Auth0, and Dropbox promise to enrich the open-source ecosystem.

Being a finalist at the Splash Awards is a testament to the power of collaboration and innovation. The Aqua Expeditions website redefines luxury travel in the digital age, elevating how these world-class experiences are shared and inspiring the next wave of digital transformation in the travel industry.

About Aqua Expeditions

A recognized global leader in luxury small-ship expeditions, Aqua Expeditions explores the world’s most biodiverse and culturally significant destinations aboard best-in-class vessels of stylish contemporary design. Venturing into unspoiled sanctuaries to witness the beauty of nature and wildlife, Aqua Expeditions sails to remote destinations with minimized human interaction, secluded from crowds. Expect tailored five-star itineraries, a highly exclusive 1:1 crew-to-guest ratio with personalized service, acclaimed cuisine by world-renowned chefs, and small group expert-guided adventure activities and excursions for all ages, with a maximum of 16-40 guests per ship.

Aqua Expeditions currently operates river explorations in the Peruvian Amazon and the Mekong Delta (Cambodia and Vietnam), and coastal yacht voyages in East Indonesia — Komodo National Park, Ambon and the Spice Islands, Raja Ampat, and Asmat — and the Galapagos Islands.