As a new venture, we understood from the start the importance of building trust with users and offering an effortless booking experience. Through our proven discovery process, we were able to work with Outdoor Inns and connected providers to fully map out the technology, booking management processes and associated user journeys. It was also noted how important it was to showcase the entire experience just as much as the accommodation – the story and ethos of Outdoor Inns, as well as everything that the UK countryside has to offer in terms of activities and places to visit.
Outdoor Inns
A seamless booking experience for an eco-friendly start-up
Client
Outdoor Inns
Deliverable
Website & Product
Timeframe
3 months
Overview
Outdoor Inns is an exciting startup with a smart business model. They provide eco-friendly and affordable places to stay in the UK’s most beautiful locations, partnering with rural pubs to support local independent businesses. They partnered with us to scale their offering by elevating their customer-facing end-to-end booking experience.
Deliverables
Headless website
WordPress CMS
Booking experience
Hostaway integration
Custom API
Recognition
Honorable Mention
Bronze
Discovery
A seamless end-to-end experience
The Outdoor Inns digital product provides a complete booking experience for the user. It enables them to explore cabins by location, discover associated local activities, book and pay for their stay, and manage their bookings all within one product. Because of the headless architecture, we were also able to deliver the frontend WordPress website, booking and payment functions on the same domain, in contrast with other booking experiences where the user may be routed off to another service or separate domain.
Fully automated booking process
To make the booking experience as smooth as possible – for both users and the Outdoor Inns team – we built a custom API to integrate the platform directly with the property management system Hostaway. Our API passes live availability data to the frontend booking site, and each time a booking is made pushes the data to Hostaway. This integration ensures a seamless and fully automated process, making management of bookings effortless for the OI team, and seamless for the user.
A seamless, integrated booking experience based on headless architecture
Planning for the future
Outdoor Inns is a rapidly changing and growing venture – so their digital product needs to keep up. To facilitate this, we’ve planned a programme of work which includes a number of agile development sprints which will allow us to continue to improve the Outdoor Inns digital experience and scale the platform. We’ve also created a series of data endpoints to enable us to begin working on a booking app that can grab data from the main setup, eventually leading to users being able to unlock doors to their cabins upon arrival simply using their smartphone.
“You’ve helped us grow – from start to finish, because you’ve been there, at every step and every stage of what a customer would go through.”
Joshua Brockley
Development Manager
Outdoor Inns
