The «VTOUR» travel platform
The ultimate and largest tour and travel guide for the Republic of Belarus, the VTOUR platform is the destination website for discovering and purchasing the best travel experiences within the country.
Business needs
The overarching objective of the project was simple: create a corporate site that allows users to easily identify travel opportunities of specific interest to themselves and/or their customers and allow them to purchase them as seamlessly as possible. In order to do so, we focused on the provision of rich information and details about each product, and making the booking experience quick, clear and reassuring throughout the buying journey
Technology stack
Analysis and suggestion
The first step we took was to consider how to surface content to the end user in the most consumable way. The content was pulled form a third party application (Travel GDS) in raw form, our challenge was to present this data in such a way that finding the right experience, learning about the value it provided and subsequently booking it, was highly effective in order to drive sales conversion.
Functionality & design
At each stage we focused on UX optimisation. This was imperative as it made the UI as intuitive and easy to use as possible, allowing the user to drill-down to the most relevant content with as few steps as possible.
Being connected to the core information repository (megatec) via API, the product would be up to date in real-time and therefore, once relevant experiences were found, the user could be confident about availability before booking.
To surface the correct as expediently as possible, we obsessed about taxonomy applications and using efficient meta data as smartly as possible. As a result, users could quickly select a locality and a party size and immediately be presented with relevant options. Once selected, a tour could then be supplemented with optional extras such as transfers, optional extras and insurance options.
We then augmented the system with the ability to immediately harvest end-user information using OCR and the scanning of official documentation. This helped create the end-user accounts, to which additional information such as bookmarked tours could be added to, as well as existing and future bookings.
Ultimately, the project was so successful that, as well as providing an optimum service to travel and tourism booking agents, it created to opportunity to be deployed directly to market where end users can plan and purchase their own experiences independently of a managed process.
In summary
We delivered an optimised solution for identifying and booking tours within Belarus through a perfect system of work. Refining the process over a year of design and development, and bringing it to life via a stunning UI, we created a market-leading service to professionals within the industry, as well as a direct to consumer portal to drive tourism within the Country to new heights.