Yas Island

Services

Platforms

XM Cloud

Overview

Increasing vacation bookings through seamless, personalized experiences

Yas Island, the Middle East’s premier leisure and entertainment destination, embarked on a transformative journey to revolutionize its digital experience and booking process.

Faced with a website that hindered user engagement and conversion, YasIsland.com’s marketing team envisioned a more seamless platform that matched the excitement of the destination itself.

Partnering with Horizontal Digital, YasIsland.com created a new digital experience that elevates the visitor journey, drives profitability, and further positions the holiday destination as an icon in global tourism.

Since the website’s launch, Horizontal and Yas Island have worked side by side to continuously enhance customer experiences and fuel revenue growth year and year.

The highlights

Continuous improvements
With improved data analytics, new features and content can be tailored based on customer behavior.
Higher revenue
Built a frictionless booking journey, cutting out white-label solutions and driving higher volume of direct bookings. margins from direct bookings.
Immersive experience design
Redesigned the site to highlight Yas Island’s brand value propositions—with more interactive visuals and dynamic content to bring the destination’s diverse attractions to life.
Improved customer retention
With Sitecore’s personalization capabilities, domestic and international guests are presented with more relevant offers based on previous interactions.

The situation

The adventure starts on YasIsland.com

With 4 world class theme parks, 10 hotels, an F1 racetrack, golf courses and concert venues, Yas Island offers the ultimate holiday adventure.

But online, guests faced too many hurdles. The booking process stretched across two platforms and ten confusing steps, creating frustration and checkout abandonments. The website was unable to serve tailored content for Yas Island’s diverse audience of families, thrill-seekers, and luxury travelers.

The belief our teams were operating on was that “the thrill of the holiday starts the moment you search for it online.” That meant we needed to showcase the vast array of packages in a simplified manner and to center them around customer intent to make booking a breeze.

The response

A smoother ride: Reimagining YasIsland.com's online visitor journey

YasIsland.com worked closely with Horizontal Digital to identify the right solutions to enhance the guest experience, improve long-term customer retention, and drive value back to the broader Yas Island and Miral ecosystem.

We leveraged the full potential of their Sitecore platform to enable scalability and personalization capabilities. Throughout every sprint, our collaboration was flexible and tailored to what the client needed in the moment.

Continuous data-driven optimization

By embracing a continuous improvement model, we’ve delivered new features, experiences, and optimizations that drive measurable growth. One of the key strengths of the YasIsland.com’s platform is its ability to collect and analyze data on customer behavior, preferences, and trends. These insights help to continuously create more engaging marketing campaigns and improve the website experience, like testing different checkout flows.

This data-driven approach has also enhanced overall business operations. The ability to react to customer preferences and trends has given the iconic destination a competitive edge, enabling the team to stay ahead of the curve in a fast-evolving industry.

Personalizing guest experiences

YasIsland.com now can create tailored experiences for a diverse range of personas, including thrill-seekers, families, foodies, and event enthusiasts. By integrating customer data paired with a new content strategy, Yas Island is able to serve dynamic content, offers, and journeys that resonate with visitors, leading to proven engagement and conversions.

Creating a seamless booking journey

YasIsland.com integrated the booking system into a single, streamlined process, reducing the number of steps from ten to just three. This simplification makes booking faster, easier, and far less frustrating for guests.

Not only does the new YasIsland.com experience set a new benchmark in the tourism industry for one of the shortest booking journeys. The site also delivers personalized sessions connected to dozens of stakeholders on and off the island allowing us to curate the perfect seasonal, demand-centric holiday experiences for our guests.

eCommerce Director | Karan Chimnani

The results

More guests, more stays, more smiles

The results of YasIsland.com’s digital transformation were nothing short of remarkable. The website hasn’t stood still since launch, and neither has its performance. Yas Island’s story shows what’s possible when you treat your digital platform as a living, always-growing asset. The continuous optimizations have led to significant improvements in both user experience and business performance, setting new benchmarks within the travel and tourism industry. Some key achievements include:

550%Increase in conversion rates across the booking funnel
52%Compound annual growth rate since launch in 2021
15%Increase in returning visitors
4Digital experience award recognitions in 2025
20+New theme park and event packages launched

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