Keetrax built a beautiful new online booking website for tour operator Borneo Adventure.
We developed the Borneo Adventure
website in stages
We love working with tour operators because their product is an open invitation for beautiful image-driven websites. Just like travelling itself, selling travel is about creating stories and inspiring people to become part of the story.
Borneo Adventure switched to the Rezdy booking system that would integrate into their new website. For their website this meant that they had to switch from a brochure-type overview to a full-fledged selling platform.
Because Borneo Adventure already had an existing WordPress website, we decided to try out a phased approach to building the new website, for the first time with a website of this scale. We built a single aspect of the site, got feedback from the client and launched it to the live website straight away.
- Feedback loops were incredibly short. We built a feature and could see real visitors interact with it in a matter of weeks, rather than waiting for the whole website to be completed first.
- Nobody was ever waiting for somebody. This was a game changer for us. For the client, their website was continuously evolving and updating.
- Borneo Adventure could generate extra traffic every time we released something. Every other month, the client could reveal a new part of their website and get old visitors to revisit their new site.
In all, building the website in stages made it more fun & less stressful for everybody involved, but most of all gave Borneo Adventure a lot more exposure on their new website and us better feedback. This improved both the working relationship, as well as the website.
Client Testimonal:
In addition to the positive impact on sales we have had a lot of comments and praise for the website. The website is so much easier to manage than the old site and this is another positive benefit. From a branding and sales perspective the website has been a complete success. We expected sales to increase but the growth in sales has surpassed our expectations.
– Borneo Adventures
Stage 1
Redesign
One of our primary goals with the new website was to make Borneo Adventure accessible to visitors that didn’t know much about the destination yet. The main way of classifying tours on Borneo is by their region – but we realized that for new visitors these regions do not have meaning yet.
On the new homepage we magnified the significance of the 4 regions, by showing an appealing full screen image that represents part of the region and an small animated map, that simply shows the geographical location of the region. And it worked! Analytics shows that many first time visitors scroll through the 4 images before exploring the rest of the website.
When it comes to travel destinations, stunning imagery makes all the difference. But a picture-book does not sell tours, or convince readers that this is the company to book your tour with.
Keetrax came up with a magazine-inspired concept of making 50/50 layouts the main design principle on the website. Together we worked out how this could work with either portrait images that scroll slowly as the visitor reads the text, and with sliders that slide based on the scroll position.
Stage 2
Online Bookings
Now that the Borneo Adventure site looked stunning, we needed to get to the real business goal and start selling tours directly on the website. Borneo Adventure had just switched their company over to the Rezdy booking software, which is a cloud-based booking & tour management software that offers a decent API as well as customizable iframes.
We designed the tour pages to
- show off the stunning imagery, with a single, recognizable featured image to make the tours easily distinguishable
- encourage bookings with the Rezdy iframe seamlessly integrated
- encourage reading of the itineraries with the 50/50 concept
- show the geographical location of things on an interactive map
- encourage further browsing of the site
As a final upgrade to the 50/50 concept, we introduced static videos in this layout. When a visitor views a video, the video takes up the right half of the screen, allowing the visitor to read the itinerary while viewing the video. An ideal way of keeping visitors engaged with the website.
Stage 3
Discover Borneo
The final step was for the website to diversify its content in order to
- Be more informative for new visitors about its destinations
- To engage prospective clients with the website, to discover the various destinations on the island
- To increase visibility on search engines, with informational pages about the destinations
We created a separate destinations section that visitors can use find out what destinations there are on Borneo and tours Borneo Adventure has on offer that visit these destinations. Every tour in turn links back to these destination pages, so visitors can easily lose themselves on the website, going from destination to destination.
”Mike and Danielle have done a brilliant job with the website. It looks amazing! The whole backend is so much easier to manage, the content reorganization and new maps have added value and the integration with Rezdy is already producing results.
Borneo Adventure
