BBC Travel

The BBC Travel service provides users with a continually updated, comprehensive guide to the traffic and travel situation across the UK, with a dedicated team of reporters based throughout the country to ensure travellers receive timely information on their journey and can make informed decisions about their travel plans. 

Following a successful collaboration with Box UK to update their mobile travel site, the BBC required a comprehensive technical redesign of their main travel news site, to ensure a high standard of reporting across all channels.

To maintain consistency in their digital strategy they made the decision adapt the codebase developed for the mobile site, and required Box UK to ensure the performance and stability of the system before implementing it into the site.

As the BBC is committed to comprehensive and accurate reporting it was vital that the updated site communicate a wide range of information, including incident updates and traffic camera feeds in a clear and accessible format.

As one of the primary sources of traffic and travel information, the main travel news site required more complex functionality than the previous mobile development. To accommodate this Box UK’s team of developers wrote the project from the ground up to ensure all necessary features were fully integrated into the system, along with a wide range of travel data from a number of external sources.

To provide an enhanced user experience the BBC’s traffic camera feed was tightly integrated into the site, offering visitors a real-time view of the travel situation across the country. The Mapping Toolkit, also developed by Box UK, was used to create maps providing continuously updating traffic information which were consistent with the brand’s styling. 

The BBC are now able to deliver a wide range of information in a clear and engaging format, serving up to 8 million users at times of extreme weather or heavy traffic conditions.

The finished system operates far in excess of its estimated peak usage, serving up to four times as many requests as anticipated, while ensuring the highest possible performance to prevent any disruption to the experience of the site’s visitors.