Lakelovers
Re-imagining the Lakes accommodation leaders
Web design
Web development
Booking engine integration
Lakelovers are the largest holiday cottage provider in the Lake District. Established in 1977, they have a portfolio of nearly 800 properties, from character cottages to 5-star opulence. In today’s increasingly competitive holiday rental landscape.
Lakelovers approached us as they needed to extend their superlative guest experience into the digital space by improving their website’s overall customer experience journey, from an aesthetic point of view right through to the technology used behind the scenes.
We redesigned the guest-facing digital experiences, simplifying the overall customer journey and hooked all of this in to their property management system TAB’s. Creating a website that completely re-imagines the way that customers find, book and enjoy their holiday, putting the needs of the user first, making searching for, learning about and booking a property a seamless and enjoyable experience.
Gaining authentic insights
By drawing up a customer experience action plan, we prioritised the website features and objectives according to how high they ranked in overall customer satisfaction. First on the list was the user-interface design for all aspects of the checkout journey.
We ran a series of user behaviour studies to find out where the checkout process pinch points were, highlighting what elements were just getting in the way and what needed to be added, improved to enrich the customer experience journey.
“Gendall have been so very accommodating and professional yet with the all-important ‘personal touch’, working with the team becomes part of your daily life and long may that continue.”
Paul Liddell
Managing Director
Setting objectives
Having run a business impact analysis workshop, one of the primary objectives we identified for the Lakelovers site rebuild was to improve the overall loading speed performance. A faster site creates a far better experience for users across the board, but is especially relevant for the growing percentage of users on mobile devices (>50%) where bandwidth and connection-reliability are real concerns. An efficient, faster site saves users time and improves their chances of conversion. This in turn adds measurable impact to the business bottom line. By drastically reducing the database size, reducing calls and implementing an all round efficiency drive that included a CDN and advanced caching, we were able to reduce the load time of the site by 85% compared to the old site and significantly increase mobile revenue.
Underpinning connections
Our bespoke WordPress booking engine adaptor, ‘Gendall Gateway’* was implemented to sit in-between the website and the TABS API, enabling the importing/updating of property data attributes, prices, special offers, content, images, availability and general info as caching data. As the results were returned through caching data, fewer API calls were needed, enhancing the site speed performance and saving revenue.
*‘Gendall Gateway’ is the culmination of over 25 years of experience working with multiple booking engines, developing bespoke booking systems and designing solutions for the tourism and destination sector. It puts you back in control, sitting between your website and booking engine, it enhances site performance whilst giving you the flexibility to change to a new booking software solution in the future, without changing your website.
Updating made easy
Lakelovers are able to manage all their property-integrations through a custom dashboard within the WP admin area, allowing them to update different aspects of any property at the push of a button (removing their dependence on the unreliable, insecure, and performance-heavy scripts they were previously using).
De-risking the project
We de-risked the content migration by keeping the old booking engine running in parallel until everything was in place and signed off. The new codebase was built with maintenance and ongoing improvement in mind, making adding new features and enhancements a much more straightforward process than it was in the past.
