Travel Counsellors is one of the UK’s largest independent travel companies, with more than 2,000 franchisees Travel Counsellors operating around the world.

Its model is built around personal service. Customers are matched with their own dedicated Travel Counsellor, someone who takes time to understand what they need, shape the right trip and support them before, during and after they travel.

The challenge was that the website did not reflect the strength of that model. Visitors could explore destinations, but it was harder to understand how the service worked, why it was different and how to find the right person to help.

Tangent partnered with Travel Counsellors to redesign the website around the real value of the business: expert human travel planning, made easier to access through digital experience and AI-supported matching. 

This was not just a travel website redesign. The work needed to make Travel Counsellors’ model easier to understand, trust and act on.

The audience was time-poor, experience-rich and often planning complex, high-value trips. They were not simply comparing destinations or prices. They wanted confidence that someone would understand the kind of trip they were trying to create.

We worked with Travel Counsellors’ internal teams, senior stakeholders and performance marketing partners to review the existing experience, define the key journeys and identify where the site needed to do more.

That led to a clearer strategy for the new site: bring the “who” and “why” forward, not just the “where”. The experience needed to inspire customers, explain the value of the service and create a stronger route from interest to enquiry.

TC Match became a key part of that route. The AI-powered tool captures what customers are looking for, then uses internal booking data to help match them with a Travel Counsellor best suited to their trip.

We created a new digital direction that felt more confident and more premium, without losing the warmth of the Travel Counsellors brand.

Core pages were restructured to explain how the service works, what customers can expect and why a dedicated Travel Counsellor can make planning a trip easier, more personal and more reassuring.

Destination content still plays an important role, but the new experience gives more space to the people behind the service, the value of expert planning and the reassurance of having someone on hand throughout the journey.

For TC Match, the interaction needed to feel natural and lightweight. Customers could share useful details about their trip without feeling like they were filling in a long form or using a generic search tool.

Alongside the page designs, we created a reusable component system to support campaigns, editorial content, Travel Counsellor profiles and market-specific pages.

The new site was designed and built on Umbraco 13, preserving existing functionality while creating a stronger foundation for future rollout.

The platform supports responsive front-end delivery, SEO, analytics, conversion tracking, lead capture and routing, as well as the Travel Counsellor directory and matching experience.

Behind TC Match, an LLM-powered conversation captures customer preferences and passes structured data into a matching engine, using factors such as availability, destination experience, booking history and trip type to recommend a relevant Travel Counsellor.

 

This gives the website a more active role in the business: helping turn customer interest into better-qualified enquiries for the Travel Counsellor network.