Africa Travel Resource
Custom Vue.JS Web Application and CMS
Africa Travel Resource provide complex custom safari trips to clients around the globe looking for a once in a lifetime holiday. ATR wanted to provide an immersive UX to engage new customers and generate enquiries. They wanted to educate their customers on the positive and negative sides of safari tourism in Africa to encourage more sustainable choices. We were engaged to build a new full stack web application to streamline their business.
- Lead time:
- 18 months
- Sector:
- Travel & leisure
- Target Type:
- B2C
- Demographic:
- High net worth individuals
- Project Goal:
- Generate enquiries, promote sustainable tourism
- Services:
- Web App Design, Web App Development, DevOps
- Stack:
- Vue JS Frontend & Laravel Backend
- Scope
- Adobe XD wireframes
- Adobe XD prototypes
- Front-end Development
- Back-end Development
- Quality Assurance Testing
- Resource
- 1x User Experience Designer
- 1x User Interface Designer
- 2x Front-end Developers
- 2x Back-end Developers
- 1x DevOps Engineer
- 1x Project Manager
- 2x Quality Assurance Testers
Tourism for conservation
ATR’s mission is to provide sustainable safari experiences to their customers and it was important for this to be reflected in their new website.
The challenge
Buying a safari holiday is a complex process that, to do successfully, requires experience and knowledge. Seasonality on a safari doesn’t just refer to the weather, it means that lions can be in your location one week but will be gone the next. Before an ATR agent can start to build a custom trip, the customer must first undertake a period of discovery where they uncover the experiences and locations available, gaining a base level of knowledge.
Our challenge was to engage the user, demonstrating the possibilities that a safari holiday can offer, building a relationship with the user. The discovery process usually happens over a period of a couple of weeks to months and during this time, engagement needed to be tracked via touchpoints such as favouriting, time spent on the site, chat interactions, and the number of visits.
Photography
The award winning ATR photography immerses users in Africa and acts as a window to the experiences that they could have.
Interactive maps
Interactive maps provide insight into locations and accommodation as a user builds their trip. The visual nature of the maps makes trips shareable with friends and family.
Getting started
Booking a safari holiday can be overwhelming, so we created a place for new visitors to get started easily.
Using big data
ATR have been gathering data throughout their years in business and have produced a huge dataset to predict weather, animal migration patterns, lodges and experiences at different times of the year. We harnessed this data to produce a detailed search that enables customers with no knowledge of African safaris to start planning their holiday.
The dynamic search
We combined a dynamic natural language search with an interactive map to form the core navigation for the website. The search offers drop down options that adapt based on the user’s selection to provide the most relevant search. Furthermore, it facilitates top level searches for customers starting out on their safari journey, but also deeper searches for users with a greater knowledge level who are further through their discovery cycle.
The ATR search factors in a wide range of variables including the time of year, regional experiences, animal migration and lodge, location and conservation ratings.
Due to the complexity of booking a safari holiday, ATR advisors have been trained to guide customers through the discovery process. The search has been created to replicate this process to provide the maximum support for users and drive the maximum number of sales for ATR.
Positive change
As an industry leader, ATR can change the way that people book safari holidays. By putting the user first and taking responsibility for the trips they sell, ATR can have a positive impact on the people, animals and environment of Africa. The new website helps ATR to do this.
