Overview
Scout Ski is a hotel booking website designed to help skiers find great hotels and book them easily and instantly. Scout sources all the information, local tips and deals that the user needs for their overseas ski holiday.
Scout has visited each and every hotel on the site and provides unique insider-knowledge reviews for hotels and resorts. The Scout Magazine and Gallery also offers original ski articles, images and video delivered via the website, email and social media.
Hotel room content, pricing and availability are sourced via the EAN API. Hotel room content is then edited and augmented by the Scout team via the CMS to create Scout’s in-depth hotel reviews.
The Challenge
Our challenge was to utilise the EAN inventory but present it in a much engaging and useful way than standard travel sites. We also needed to create a powerful CMS behind the scenes where Scout could easily manage hotels and their content, magazine & Gallery articles as well as users and their bookings.
The Results
We designed and developed the site with user experience top of mind, combining high quality graphic design with smart functionality focussed on the customer’s needs including:
– Intelligent predictive search – an auto-prompt list appears as the user starts typing in the keyword field, with matching hotels, resort and countries. It even matches against common misspellings.
– Hotel shortlist – the user can start adding and removing hotels right from the search results page, and don’t even need to be logged in.
– Sharing – easy to share specific hotels and articles
– Personalisation – content recommendations targeted to the customer’s interests and search terms, to help them quickly find what’s most relevant to them.
The custom-built CMS enables Scout to:
– Import hotel content from EAN as a foundation, then edit and enhance it to create unique curated content.
– Create resort, country, Magazine and Gallery content and publish across all media.
– Tag & cross-link any content within the site, to help direct the user from hotels to related site content and vice versa.
Bitcraft’s involvement:
– Digital strategy consulting
– UX (user personas, wireframes, IA) and functional specification
– Design concepting and production
– Search engine optimisation
– Integration with travel booking engine
– Implementation of e-commerce gateway
– Development of website and database backend (PHP, MySQL)
– Ongoing maintenance and updates
– Website hosting
