Specialising in ticket-inclusive sporting experiences for over 30 years, Mike Burton Group is a tour operator operating travel programmes for a number of iconic sporting rights holders. Through various joint venture businesses with major international sporting rights holders, 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 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.
Mike Burton Group’s objective was to develop a new online travel platform their different sports travel businesses. This platform was developed for and first used with the 2019 Rugby World Cup site.
The platform laid the foundation for each booking site to utilise an individual theme and design, greeting the user with a unique, branded experience. Themes were implemented for all the group’s brands.
Successful implementations including CC 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.
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.
The primary objectives of efficiency and flexibility were met, with major components of the delivery being focused on performance and user experience.
All visitors enjoy seamless navigation through the searching and buying stages of the booking process and beyond.
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.
Highly dynamic functionality and instant feedback when the user makes an interaction with the site, provides an improved customer experience.
Inspiretec’s in-house digital agency has launched several different websites for Mike Burton Group. All of which include brochureware and booking functionality, providing platforms for all their official supporter travel offerings.
Mike Burton Group launched several more websites in the next phase, including 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.
The Lions Rugby Travel website, platform of the official travel company for The British & Irish Lions, was accommodated in the same web engine, with Priority Access Passes available for purchase, opening special events and tickets for early access to priority access pass holders.
Online bookings handled in week one
Total bookings made online
Customer experience
As your customers evolve how they travel, you have to evolve how you do business.
