The Mike Burton Group.

Specialising in sports travel, hospitality and event management, The Mike Burton Group offers market leading exclusive official travel packages.

Through various joint venture businesses with major international sporting rights holders, The Mike Burton Group offers official supporter travel packages for iconic sporting events. These joint ventures include:

• England Rugby Travel, the official travel company of England Rugby, working with the Rugby Football Union to operate domestic and international travel programmes for England Rugby supporters, including Rugby World Cups, Six Nations, Autumn Internationals and more, together with a schools, clubs and university sports tours business for both England Rugby Travel and England Sports Tours.

   

• ICC Travel & Tours, the official travel company of the ICC operating the Champions Trophy 2017, Cricket World Cup 2019 and T20, Australia 2020.

   

• Team GB Live, the official travel company of the British Olympic Association, taking supporters to the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympics, Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics, Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics and Paris 2024 Summer Olympics.

   

• Lions Rugby Travel, working with The British & Irish Lions providing the official supporter tours for the British & Irish Lions Tours.

Providing a powerful web engine.

Specialising in ticket-inclusive sporting experiences for over 30 years, The Mike Burton Group is a tour operator operating travel programmes for a number of iconic sporting rights holders.

Inspiretec’s in-house digital agency, Sequence, have launched several different websites for The Mike Burton Group. All of which include brochureware and booking functionality, providing platforms for all their official supporter travel offerings. England Rugby Travel’s 2019 Rugby World Cup Travel site and England Rugby Travel’s domestic and international travel site, ICC Travel & Tours Cricket World Cup 2019 site, Team GB Live’s Tokyo 2020 site and England Sports Tours have gone live with the new websites.

The Mike Burton Group’s objective was to develop a new online travel platform to be used for their different sports travel businesses. This platform was developed for and first put to use with the 2019 Rugby World Cup site, enabling fans worldwide to purchase exclusive official travel packages for Asia’s first Rugby World Cup in Japan. The site launched to a select group of England Rugby Travel priority access pass customers in April 2018 and delivered the digital element of England Rugby Travel’s integrated marketing campaign for the tournament.

The platform lays the foundation for The Mike Burton Group’s other developing sites, allowing them to re-use the engine to drive their rapidly growing joint venture official supporter travel portfolio.

ICC Travel and Tours followed with a ticket-inclusive package selling platform for cricket’s greatest tournament, providing get-aways for all 48 games in England and Wales. Each booking platform uses an individual theme and design, greeting the user with a unique and branded experience. Themes will be implemented for all the group’s brands.

Integration for seamless booking journeys.

The innovative website engine, employed in the live platforms, delivers both short and long-haul travel packages for customers. This includes search, cost and booking stages.  The branded sites sit within a single Umbraco CMS and integrate with the group’s third-party tour reservation platform and an external payment provider. The Umbraco platform has been extended to provide bespoke features specific to the group’s requirements, such as reporting and the ability to manually push through bookings into internal processing systems.

Major components of the delivery are performance and user experience. Visitors enjoy seamless navigation through searching and buying stages of the booking process.

Several automated optimisations were made to the code during builds and caching plays its part to improve the speed of content delivery on the site. This results in highly dynamic functionality and instant feedback when the user makes an interaction. The primary objectives of efficiency and flexibility were met. 

Future launches.

The Mike Burton Group will launch several more websites in the next phase, including both brochureware sites and booking platforms. The projects currently at hand include The British & Irish Lions Tour 2021 in South Africa and a plan to replace The Mike Burton Group brochureware website.

Lions Rugby Travel website, platform of the official travel company for The British & Irish Lions, will be accommodated in the same web engine and will be launching soon, with Priority Access Passes available for purchase, opening special events and tickets for early access to priority access pass holders. This site will then transform into a booking platform for when the official travel packages are released.