About Eurostar
Eurostar is a company that provides high speed train services from the UK to France and Belgium.
The Challenge
Eurostar runs promotions constantly for ticket specials, train deals, new destinations, and contests. As part of the travel company’s marketing strategy, they link to these promotions using URLs that are published across campaigns on TV, in print, and on social media. By redirecting existing URLs, Eurostar can re-use these URLs for renewed promotions and not have to worry about having dead links, or having promotional materials that have outdated links. This also ensures that Eurostar can avoid the SEO penalties that some websites incur when they have too many 404 errors.
As these promotions are constantly changing, the task of staying on top of proper URL redirects can be a big burden for IT teams. This can also cause delays for marketing teams when they are trying to push new promotions online.
David Opperman, DevOps Manager at Eurostar, tried many different methods for URL redirection: redirection at the DNS registrar level, redirection using their own content delivery networks, and redirection using their own purpose built solution. However, the above methods were still demanding tasks for the IT team. Eurostar then turned to urllo for their URL redirection needs.
The Result
Today Eurostar uses urllo to manage their redirects: from setting them up, to changing target sites, and making sure that all the links work and are up-to-date. Opperman and Eurostar spend minimal time on URL redirection which lets them focus on other IT tasks.
