From Static Booking Site to Global Growth Engine

 

Big Bus Tours had strong brand visibility in 23 cities worldwide, but their fragmented digital experience wasn’t keeping pace. With disjointed localised booking sites and inconsistent UX, they were missing out on conversion, upsell, and long-term customer engagement.

Reframing the Opportunity: From Local Sites to Global Digital Growth

The total addressable market for urban tourism is massive, but Big Bus’s was under-leveraged due to digital limitations. Their share of market in direct digital bookings lagged behind potential.

The opportunity wasn’t just a website rebuild, it was to transform the brand’s digital presence into a global revenue engine. One that could inspire exploration, drive bookings, and scale across international markets.

Strategic Moves: Turning a Brand into a Digital Business

Platform Thinking for Global Scale:
We created a single, unified ecommerce platform that works across 23 cities (and counting). This brought together payment, ticketing, content, and UX into one scalable system.

Consistent, Localised Experience:
Modular design and smart content architecture allowed for language, currency, and cultural adaptation—while maintaining brand consistency globally.

From Transactional to Experiential:
The new platform isn’t just for booking—it helps users explore routes, discover attractions, and plan their trip before they even arrive.

Data-Driven Personalisation:
Behavioural insights informed the UX, allowing the platform to dynamically surface relevant content, offers, and local recommendations.

Built for Growth:
The tech stack and content strategy were designed to flex—adding new cities, campaigns, and services without starting from scratch.

Business Outcomes:

  • +31% global increase in conversion. A unified, optimised UX turned more visits into bookings.

  • +96% growth in pre-bookings. Improved engagement and planning tools drove earlier customer commitment.

  • 40% reduction in new market launch costs. Modular platform design enabled faster, leaner global rollout.

  • Platform live in 23+ cities and growing. Supporting international scale with local flexibility.

  • Built for expansion, partnership, and upsell. A future-ready digital foundation powering growth beyond core services.

Functional Value Delivered

  • Conversion-Driven UX: A smoother, smarter journey that turns curiosity into bookings

  • Platform Efficiency: One global system powering many local experiences

  • Scalable Architecture: Designed to grow with the business across cities and services

  • Brand as Utility: Reinforced Big Bus’s brand promise through useful, immersive digital experiences

  • Deeper Engagement: Supported the full customer lifecycle—before, during, and after the ride

  • Operational Agility: Enabled the business to update content, launch offers, and respond to local needs fast

Recent Projects

Working with one of the UK’s largest retailers, our team helped define, plan, and scope a comprehensive loyalty programme that now serves as the foundation for a wide range of functional benefits. What began as a retail initiative has evolved into a platform that extends well beyond shopping—integrating seamlessly into the daily lives of over 8 million users and driving long-term engagement, utility, and brand value.

Our team has played a central role in shaping the processes behind a newly established fund, purpose-built to support the innovation ecosystem by improving access to capital. Recognising the unique challenges faced by venture capital, growth, and private equity managers, we collaborated closely with private asset managers across Europe and North America to design systems tailored to the specific financing needs of this sector.

Many brands face challenges integrating acquired businesses, often lacking a clear strategy for whether the brand should remain, merge, or be retired.

Our work with a leading insurance firm, following multiple acquisitions has helped build stronger collaboration across the organisation and contributed to a 165% increase in market value.

Case Studies

 

What we believe in

  • For over two decades, we’ve been observing, understanding, and engaging with human behaviour in all its complexity, capturing what makes us unique and what brings us together.

    At FIT, our researchers immerse themselves in the real world, because we believe the best way to understand change is to experience it up close, from within.

  • As Nicholas Negroponte noted, we’re shifting from atoms to bits. Data is becoming central to everyday life. But data alone, no matter how big, isn’t enough. On its own, it doesn’t lead to the right decisions.

    We go beyond surface behaviours to explore emotions, fixations, and deeper human needs. What truly creates value? How can that value be captured, and scaled?

  • We design projects in partnership with our clients and stakeholders, knowing that collaboration leads to real impact and practical results.

    Using collective intelligence and design thinking, we create artefacts, films, books, prototypes, products, and narratives that drive meaningful change.