Sector(s)
Team Members
Introduction
Global Touring comprises three unique brands offering distinct travel experiences. From Topdeck Travel, promoting small group adventures to the Gen Z demographic, to Back-Roads Touring offering premium, off the beaten track experiences, and Grasshopper Adventures, serving active communities through bike tours. Each brand requires a unique look and feel, appealing to diverse audience groups.
Powered by Drupal, Zoocha delivered a multisite platform capable of flexing to the distinct checkout flows, visual appeal and content of each platform.
About the project
Immersive Design
We began our journey in design thinking workshops, immersing ourselves in each brand, history and digital ambitions. This allowed us to target functionality such as the booking flow, ideating on how we would be able to optimise this journey and ultimately increase conversions. User testing revealed greater appetite for visual interaction, brought to life through clickable itineraries and mapping features that help to inspire engagement with each trip.
Shared Codebase
The Back-Roads Touring platform serves as the foundation for the ability for Global Touring to centralise their Drupal estate of sites that are mostly similar, but operating independently. This allows Global Touring to bring their sites into one shared codebase, increasing the maintainability and efficiency of development from a technical standpoint. This has already added value to the Global Touring team, with the Grasshopper Adventures platform brought under this umbrella earlier this year. This decreases the effort spent managing updates and upgrades, as well as dramatically reducing risk in future deployments.
The robust nature of the Back-Roads Touring platform has enabled a core foundation to be shared with Grasshopper Adventures as well as accommodate the unique functional needs of the site. For example, distinct payment functionality that results in diverging checkout flows, all handled from one foundational codebase.
This foundation has been built with the aim of accommodating a vast and diverse digital estate, including app functionality due to the wealth of APIs developed to connect between the different Global Touring systems. Global Touring are now able to build and offer new services in a relatively plug and play environment, increasing independence and flexibility over their own digital estate.
The Results
Since going live we have recorded some strong impact. On Back-Roads Touring particularly, bookings have increased by 28% (YOY) with a direct channel share improved by 2%. Throughout the inspire to purchase journey there has been a 14% increase of traffic through destination, itinerary, dates and prices pages, showing more user engagement and an increase in average time spent from 2m 24s to 2m32s.
The booking funnel page flows have seen significant improvements, with the most significant from gathering customer details to payment screen – seeing a 120% increase in conversion. Site engagement rate increased by 6% and overall the site improvements have delivered a 16% increase in traffic, more people than last year, more engaged and better conversion.
Back to topWhy Drupal was chosen
Drupal was chosen primarily for flexibility and usability, allowing the Global Touring digital estate to scale without compromising performance or maintainability. Additionally, Drupal’s API-first architecture has enabled ease of integration with key booking management systems, keeping Global Touring trips and customers consistent with a single source of truth.
The Global Touring team have particularly enjoyed working with Drupal and highlight its ease of use, allowing junior content editors to take ownership of their content with minimal risk.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Commerce
Provides a solid and configurable basis for our bespoke commerce implementation. Together with contrib modules for the payment gateways, we can be confident in the security and stability of the system.
Domain
Enables distinct 'brands' within one Drupal platform. Content, configuration and settings vary between the brands, and are easily configured by CMS site administrators.
Dacets & search_api & search_api_solr
Using Search API and the new Facets 3 exposed filters allows us to easily setup the majority of the search. The plugin system makes it easy to create our own suggestors and data processors, as well as integrate with the domain suite of modules to show/hide facets by brand.
Inline_entity_form
Allows us to have a smooth user journey of combined forms, whilst keeping the structure simplified with distinct entities for different data types.
Migrate_tools & migrate_plus suite
Enables the bulk of a migration to be written in config using existing plugins. The suite covers a wide range of data types, and we were able to extend the plugins to cover bespoke entities between the old and new sites.
Openid_connect
Facilitates seamless SSO across the website and app.
