Alpes Travel – Booking Platform - User experience and website redesign
A streamlined booking engine for French rental properties.
100%
Increase in conversions
The Story
Alpes Travel, a property rental and management company in the Chamonix Valley, came to us for a complete refresh of their website. The site needed modernising and the user experience required a complete rework to help improve conversions, increase direct bookings and secure new property listings.
In the month prior thanks to an outdated website, Alpes Travel had been relying on the likes of AirBnB and Booking.com to secure customers. However, these platforms have high listing fees which quickly eat into profits – the team were ready to refresh the website and increase direct bookings.
From a messy user flow…
The biggest challenge we faced was the user flow during the booking process. Beds24 is an essential integration for all rental companies, hostels and hotels. They offer a comprehensive internet booking engine, which links to 3rd party platforms (such as Airbnb) and allows full, seamless management of the entire booking process.
This booking system was embedded in the website, however, its functionality was limited on the Alpes Travel site itself. Whilst all the information was available on the property page, users weren’t able to select their chosen dates, instead, they had to click through to another property page, with the same content, on a Beds24 domain to find availability and then complete the booking.
It was a clunky and messy user experience that, unsurprisingly was struggling to convert users to customers.
To a seamless booking experience
During our initial investigation of the project, we realised the current embeds, plugins and API Beds24 were offering weren’t going to work. The API didn’t have the integration capabilities we needed.
We decided to go straight to the source and contacted Beds24 to explain our vision. Excitingly, they promised us access to a new API they were building which offered a lot more flexibility.
With this in mind we were able to completely redesign the user flow, UX and UI of the website. The Beds24 team supported us throughout the build, helping to fix bugs along the way and best integrate the new API into our new design.
This enabled us to streamline the booking process, enabling users to view properties, select dates, check availability and book directly on the Alpes Travel website. We showcased the imagery, optimised for mobile, improved speed and updated the navigation.
At the time of writing, Alpes Travel is the only booking website using the new Beds24 API 2.0 and is a best practice example of the technology in action.
Our new website has exceeded all expectations and is already outperforming what we thought was possible. In fact, during its very first weekend of being live, we experienced the highest number of bookings in 1 day ever!
Rhiannon Lee
Managing Director
Multi-Location, Multi-Language
Multi-Site is a plugin, or in this case, an out-of-the-box service available on Craft CMS. It enables administrators to run sites in multiple languages, all on the same domain - in the case of Alpes Travel, they needed the site in French and English.
Using this tool helps administrators easily manage both versions of the site in one central location, it's fast and it helps with SEO ranking as each site ranks on its local version of Google.
We were also able to easily set up multiple currencies. With properties in France and bookings from across Europe, this was an essential upgrade for a streamlined booking experience.
The Final results
With an entirely new user flow and user experience, the Alpes Travel website offers a streamlined booking experience. Users can browse the properties, change currency, check dates and easily book, without ever having to leave the site.
- Thoughtful UX
- Credibility
- Beautiful UI
- Clear CTA
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