PROJECT OBJECTIVES

Lakeside Spa Holidays are a managing agent for private holiday lets on a beautiful lakeside estate in the Cotswolds.

The project involved a complete rebuild of the website powered by Clockwork's hospitality content management system. We took the opportunity to complete a branding refresh to bring everything up to date for today’s market and target demographic.

The project objectives were to:

• Work with Hostaway's comprehensive API gather all the property information and created a bespoke booking system and calendar widget to handle the booking process.
• Create a bright, image-led design that showcased the properties available to let on the estate.
• Improve the user-journey and booking process
• Increasing direct bookings
• Ensure continuity of 3rd party systems like Booking.com and AirBnB

A key deliverable for the website development process and build required custom elements for Lakeside Spa Holidays, as well as the delivery of latest technologies to provide a delightful user experience, some technical aspects include:

• Integrating an external property management system (Hostaway) with our bespoke content managment system
• Using the Hostaway API to drive a bespoke search bar and filtering system, allowing customers to easily filter down lodges, filtering by ‘Pet Friendly’, ‘Hot Tub’ etc – showing results in real-time for a selected date and their filter criteria
• Using the Hostaway API to create a fully bespoke Availability Calendar, where customers can see easily which days a specific Lodge is booked/available/blocked – they can hover over/click on a date and see the available stays: i.e 3 nights, 4 nights etc – and can see the price for each stay.
• Using the Hostaway API to create a custom booking and checkout process – we also created a fully bespoke checkout process where the user can create and pay for a booking.
• We used a handful of Custom Fields – these are fields within Hostaway that provide extra information on-top of what Hostaway offers, for example, the client wanted to be able to have separate, ‘Long’ and ‘Short’ descriptions, these were created as custom fields and pulled through the API and into the correct place on the website.
• Bespoke custom fields to allow the customer can select how many cars they are bringing – this is not a standard feature of Hostaway