Website of the Week: Air France La Boutique
Air France is one of the subsidiaries of the Air France KLM Group, the world´s leading airline group in terms of turnover. The company’s main hub is located at Paris-Charles de Gaulle, where it handles over 76,000 passengers each day.
Style
Click through to La Boutique and it’s soon apparent why this elegant and stylish site was shortlisted for The Moodie Report’s Travel Retail Website of the Year award.
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With generously sized photos, La Boutique allows its products to shine |
Visually impressive, a stylish script font brings the main headings to life, while subtle grey text on a white background helps ensure the screen is never cluttered and allows product photos to take centre stage.
Even the fixed category links across the top of the page have a certain style about them, with their delightful titles -Travel Beautiful, Travel Hip, Travel Gourmet… – and ‘tags’ (the small text boxes that can appear when the cursor is placed over links/images) in French. Whether or not this latter characteristic is intended, it helps add to an undoubtedly chic, Gallic feel.
Content and usability
The wonderful introduction pages greeting visitors to each of the site’s six main sections could hardly provide more of an initial incentive to shop. Head to Travel Beautiful, for instance, and accompanying an eye-catching Terre D’Hermès image is the following text:
“Well-being, irresistible appeal and radiance wherever you go! Here are elegant fragrances in stunning presentations, for women and for men. Need to freshen up? Vivifying, regenerating creams and lovely makeup are yours for the asking. For a beautiful trip, in every sense of the word.”
It’s difficult not to want to see what’s on offer after reading that. And, thankfully, browsing is made simple, as the category has been sensibly split into women’s perfumes (32 products), men’s perfumes (16) and cosmetics (17), accessible via three typically stylish boxes below.
Each section contains generously sized thumbnail photos, six to a page, with prices and savings – though only in Euros. Click on a picture and a pop-up appears containing a large, high quality image, plus further product information.
It’s a similar story in the other major category, Travel Elegant, which showcases “smart and trendy” fashion items, jewellery and watches.
A dozen fashion goods range in price from a Lacoste reversible leather belt – black on one side and brown on the other, exclusive to duty free at €49 – to a silk Carré Hermès scarf at €220; the eight jewellery pieces include a Collier Coeur Trois Diamants silver chain exclusive to Air France (€39); and there are eight watches, from Calvin Klein, Flik Flak, Lacoste, Swatch and Tissot.
The other four categories are equally well presented and high-quality, although not with the same wide choice. Travel with Air France has a small selection of gift items, including a model of the Citroen estate car introduced by the airline in 1963 to shuttle its passengers between Paris Le Bourget and Orly airports; Travel Smart covers some basics (inflatable neck pillow, electric razor, travel adaptors) without forgetting aesthetics; Travel Hip contains a handful of electronic items; and Travel Gourmet offers confectionery from the likes of Fauchon and Godiva.
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The Travel Hip section contains audio, video and computer accessories |
A wish list, to help with planning onboard purchases, and a drop-down category menu are clearly displayed on the left-hand side of the site. And four links across the bottom take users to new, exclusive and charity (Ecpat International, which helps to combat child prostitution) products, as well as information on La Boutique vouchers, whereby passengers buying duty free goods onboard a long-haul flight leaving from Paris can save money on subsequent purchases on any long-haul flight to the French capital.
Crucially, though, there is no pre-order facility. And one or two other negatives just prevent Air France providing la crème de la crème of travel retail websites.
There is no particular order in how the products are listed – not by price, nor alphabetically – and though this is not a problem in the smaller range categories, it makes searching the fragrances more troublesome than it should be. What’s more, product descriptions in this section are often basic: for example, J’Adore by Dior is listed as, simply, “Eau de parfum spray, 50 ml”.
Also, in the current climate, customs information offering instructions on how to comply with the new safety regulations, rather than being tucked away almost out of sight at the bottom of the page, deserves more prominent billing.
And the well-intentioned advice could be clearer:
“If you are connecting with another flight and are able to collect your baggage at the connection point, you must transfer any perfumes or cosmetics purchased on board to your checked baggage before proceeding through passenger screening. [This should say “perfumes or cosmetics in containers of over 100ml”. Liquids, aerosols and gels within this limit – and not exceeding 500ml in total – may be taken onboard the connecting flight provided they are contained in a transparent, resealable plastic bag of no greater than one litre capacity.] But that doesn’t stop you from buying all the duty-free items you want on board within customs limitations.
“If you are connecting with another flight and need to check your baggage through to your final destination, on-board purchases of perfumes and cosmetics will be handed over to you by cabin crew in a sealed bag together with an invoice proving that the purchase was made on board the same day. This bag must remain sealed until you arrive at your final destination. A limited number of sealed bags are available on board.”
On the whole, though, this is a quality offering and, as noted in the Website of the Year Awards review, perhaps the prettiest travel retail site around.
What we like:
There are few travel retail sites more stylish
Navigation is generally straightforward
Six products to a page and pop-up boxes make for convenient browsing
What we think needs improving/adding:
A pre-order facility
More enticing product descriptions for fragrances
The additional information (particularly on the new security rules) to be more prominent
MORE WEBSITES OF THE WEEK
Website of the Week: Young Promotion – 06/12/06
Website of the Week: Air Europa Duty Free – 29/11/06
Website of the Week: Frankfurt Airport Duty Free & Travel Value – 22/11/06
