Thomas Cook has signaled its intention to expand into international markets and make its holiday offerings available to a much wider audience than ever before, with the announcement that it plans to translate its website into several major languages for the first time.
The UK-based travel firm has just signed up Lionbridge Technologies as its new web translation partner, according to a statement released earlier today. The deal will see Lionbridge provide a comprehensive solution for Thomas Cook that includes global web operations, content creation, localization and transcreation, in order to help the travel agency establish itself overseas.
For the Thomas Cook brand, expanding into foreign markets is a major step considering that travel agencies rarely make this kind of move. Given that most other countries already have well established competitors in the travel industry, it will doubtless face a tough challenge to carve out a market for itself, but nevertheless, the trend among most consumers to do their travel research online will certainly give it an edge.
Natalie Bird, Thomas Cook Online’s Localization Manager, said that Lionbridge was chosen for its unrivalled expertise and depth of experience:
“Lionbridge’s dedicated linguistic, search optimization, quality assurance and project management professionals and their extensive travel and hospitality sector experience will enable us to achieve our goal to make Thomas Cook the leading online destination for travel worldwide.”
