“Lumar’s website optimization platform is an essential part of our SEO toolkit. I’m very pro-Protect because it enables us to resolve issues amazingly quickly. I think it may be Lumar’s secret weapon!”
Dan Holmes, Technical SEO Specialist, Ice Travel Group.
In Brief
- Client Type: Travel & Tourism
- Lumar Services: Lumar Analyze, Protect, and Professional Services
- Challenges: Managing two fast-moving, complex sites effectively.
- Outcomes: Streamlined processes, greater efficiency, daily insights, and fast issue resolution.
Client Profile
As the parent company of travel comparison websites icelolly.com and travelsupermarket.com, Ice Travel Group brings together millions of ATOL-protected package holiday deals, car hire, insurance, and more from the UK’s leading travel companies. It has won numerous awards, including the British Travel Awards, Travolution Awards, and CIM Travel Marketing Awards.
The Challenges
With around 6,500 pages across both websites, Ice Travel depends on SEO insights to understand how indexable its web pages are, and any issues that may prevent Google finding and indexing them properly.
When Dan Holmes joined the company as a Technical SEO Specialist, he found the systems it was using lacked depth and detail and turned to Lumar. “Having worked with them before, I knew the Lumar platform would provide a single source of truth to give us visibility and accountability. This includes easy-access reports and dashboards to monitor site health that we can report to the board.
“Of course we wanted a fast, efficient way to find and fix issues and bugs, but we were also looking for a third-party view – someone outside the team who could offer independent analysis. Sometimes in a company the picture gets clouded by what you think you know – and Lumar Professional Services give us the clarity we need.”
Protect and Thrive
For Dan one key benefit of the Lumar platform comes with Lumar Protect, which has been integrated into the Ice Travel CI/CD pipeline since early 2025.
“When we make a change we deploy the whole site, so every page is rebuilt,” he says. “At that point, a crawl starts automatically. It doesn’t fail the build, but it pushes any failures into a Slack channel so they can be quickly fixed. The exciting thing about this is that we’re catching a lot of stuff on the staging site, when previously we might have waited up to a day for it to be picked up.
“Also, Lumar gives us the safety net of another crawl on the production site, which catches any issues that only happen on production. In one case, we identified an issue immediately and had it resolved soon after. When you consider the whole process of flagging, liaising, speaking to people, developing the change and so on… it was a really quick turnaround.”
Intelligence Every Day
Ice Travel also uses Lumar Analyze to get regular intelligence on its websites, running crawls every business day. “We used to do this weekly,” explains Dan, “but the feedback loop was just a bit too long. Thankfully, Lumar allows us to be flexible with crawls, so now issues like broken links get caught in a day and we can create a new task straight away.”
Not only does this put everyone on the same page, but it also means Ice Travel’s SEO and dev teams work more smoothly together. “Repeated requests can easily get lost in chat threads,” says Dan, “but when something is flagged in one central place you can just bring it up in the next team meeting and everything feels more productive and collaborative.”
Big Benefits
Ice Travel also uses Lumar in conjunction with BigQuery to get a concrete picture of site behaviour. “It helps us massively,” says Dan. “We use it with Protect suites that have custom JavaScript headers. For example, if a customer searches our site for holidays in Tenerife, we pull in deals and prices from lots of other sites. We cache the ones that have been seen and resurface the popular ones on our site in different ways.
“Previously we didn’t know how frequently those deals were appearing, if they were coming up at all or how reliable the data was. Now we use Lumar to count how many deals appear and on what pages, to check whether the car hire booking table is there, and so on.
“This all feeds into a BigQuery table and we build dashboards from that. It’s really valuable, because we can present graphs and charts to the executive team to highlight issues they were unaware of.”
New Business
The flexibility of Lumar’s solutions creates potential new business opportunities too. “It helps us replicate good performance across different areas of the site,” says Dan. “Previously we tended to rely on hearsay, but now we have concrete evidence of what’s working well for one holiday destination, for example, and apply it to another. We can trigger searches, populate deals on pages, rank higher and drive traffic quickly. ”It’s a good example of how Lumar helps ensure site users are getting the information they need.
Independent Expertise
Ice Travel also regularly consults Lumar’s Professional Services team, technical SEO experts who can examine the crawl with another set of eyes.
“For example, we’ve been involved in migrations for a couple of years and I’ve really appreciated Lumar’s insight into like-for-like comparisons,” says Dan. “They often find the same things we do, which is reassuring, but in a few cases, they’ve highlighted points we’d overlooked.
“The fact is if you do migrations for a long time, they can get repetitive, so having a Lumar crawl and then an expert third-party review of it kept us on our toes. In the end, the migrations had no negative impact – and Lumar played a big role in that success. What’s more, the relationship feels like they’re colleagues, like a real extension of our team.”
The Last Word
While Dan relies on Lumar for a range of services, there’s no mistaking the feature that stands out. “The biggest and most amazing thing is the time it takes to resolve an issue flagged by Protect,” he says. “In one notable case, we found the problem really quickly, couldn’t resolve it immediately, but scheduled the fix for midday the next day. By the time Lumar had enabled us to put things right, the original problem still hadn’t been flagged by other monitoring tools.
“We see Lumar as an essential part of our SEO toolkit – and Protect might be our secret weapon! I’m looking forward to seeing what features are coming next.”
