Hitka travel agency

Main goals of the project were to:

• Migrate all existing content from Drupal 6
• Integrate with the client’s internal systems
• Provide simple system for requesting proposals
• Deliver efficient search search
• Improve the visual identity of the website

The previous website powered by Drupal 6 was redesigned because of:

• Lack of security coverage
• Weak visual identity
• Inability to use modern technologies

An important requirement for the project was automatic migration. The website consists of several hundred destinations, each of them with tens of hotels. Every piece of content contains several multimedia links. Furthermore each hotel has its own pricing which is usually updated several times per week.

Made It Digital wrote custom migration plugins to migrate the custom fields and the highly customised meta-tags. Hitka was very pleased with this part of the project because all the data was migrated correctly and after launching there was no perceivable drop in its search positions. This was beyond the expectations of the client and is an example of the expertise and experience that Made It Digital brings to all its website projects.

We decided not to migrate pricings but import them from scratch instead. As we needed to provide a tool for importing pricing models regularly, the decision to write a price-importer module also helped minimize one-time-use code. Pricing models consist of complex data for every holiday accommodation, room type, dates and transportation. First, we considered using the well known Migrate module for this task but we proceeded with building a custom batch process because Hitka needs to be able to run the import on its own.
We provided Hitka with a simple form to upload new pricing models and select which pricing model is used for each user group. After uploading a new pricing model it is parsed and stored as custom entity types and also indexed for search.

The former site was limited by a very simple search tool. It was difficult to use and visitors frequently saw no results which led to high exit rates. To minimize frustration of visitors Made It Digital recommended and delivered ‘faceted’ search on the accommodation parameters. Now visitors can filter results by facilities and location or set price ranges. We also significantly extended number of locations where users can use the search.

A major challenge was simplifying the online ordering system. We were considering Commerce for this task, but a lot of changes within every new pricing model led to significant slowing down of the website. Instead we created a custom, easy-to-use form which enables visitors to select the destination they want and then,later in the process, visitors are able to change the number of people they are ordering for and add various upsell products which are specific for every destination, whilst seeing a continually updated price.