Kirker Holidays

The context

Kirker curates cultural tours across Europe — opera trips, rail holidays, short cultural breaks — for travellers who research carefully and expect to speak to someone who knows the destination. The sales team is genuinely expert, and the business is built around that.

What was disconnected

The website presented a catalogue. The business sold expertise. Hundreds of products had to be browsable online, but the moment a customer had a real question the journey needed to hand them to the specialist who managed that region — and the old site had no idea who that was.

Underneath it sat a legacy data structure complex enough that most of the product logic had migrated into people’s working knowledge rather than the system.

What we changed

We built a headless web application that behaves like an app rather than a brochure: fast to browse, quick to filter, and able to move a customer towards either a booking or a conversation, depending on which they need.

The data migration was the hard part, and the integration work was highly bespoke — Kirker’s listings and groupings vary by region, by city and by specialist, and the platform had to reflect that rather than flatten it.

It was built marketing-ready. Campaign landing structures, product grouping and content are all things the marketing team can act on without a developer.

Which disciplines were involved

Experience built the platform; Advisory shaped the stack and the integration approach.

What improved

A complex legacy data structure now lives in a headless CMS the team can manage, customers get a coherent path to either booking online or reaching the right specialist, and the platform has room to grow in both functionality and design.

What the work taught

The instinct on a catalogue site is to make everything bookable. The better answer here was to make the right things bookable and route everything else to the person who could actually sell it.