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By ypencil on
Western Canada is home to some of the world’s top ski and snowboard destinations. And if you want to do the Rocky Mountains right, you have to go with the experts.
Backside Tours organizes and guides group ski trips all over Western Canada. They’re known not just for their expertise, but for their great people and fun-lovin’ culture. Business was booming, but Backside Tours knew they needed the web to keep their momentum going.
Why Drupal was chosen:
Drupal was the obvious answer to all of Backside’s online challenges. We used the Drupal content management system to build a highly customized sales tool and a full customer management interface for Backside account managers. The system lets Backside build trip packages, and promote them through email newsletters managed by our favourite email partner, Industry Mailout. Each promoter can build and promote their own trips, and communicate with people that sign up.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
Mapping the customer experience
First, we worked with Backside Tours to map out their entire customer service business model. Running a ski tour business is more than just opening the door of a bus – we ended up with a user flow chart that was so detailed it covered an entire office wall.
Building the web experience
Then it was time to turn their service model into a great web experience. Their website needed a more modern system that could handle Backside Tour’s complex content and e-commerce needs.
One e-commerce workflow to rule them all
The coolest parts of this project happened behind the scenes. We built a trip-booking engine that lets Backside trip organizers build and manage all their trips through the website.
Trip booking
Ski trips aren’t your typical online transaction – this isn’t like buying a t-shirt. There’s complex information to manage, like rental boot sizes and hotel roommates. The booking interface gives trip organizers all the information they need to organize their trip.
The payment process is unique too. Most e-commerce transactions only have to deal with one payment. Ski trips are usually paid in multiple installments. So we set up a custom PayPal payment system to make it work.
Reporting
Trip organizers have to manage a lot of details – hotels, lift tickets, buses, rentals – for hundreds of people over dozens of trips. They also need to keep a close eye on the financial health of their trip.
Before this project, trip organizers had to enter all this data manually into a spreadsheet. Needless to say, that had to change.
So we built a complete reporting system that gives organizers all the information they need, whenever they need it. They can now manage hotels, buses, rentals, and promotion efforts, all through an easy-to-use interface on the website.
Now that their new website has launched, we’re working with Backside to help them meet the evolving needs of their business and improve their marketing tools. Backside continues to lead Alberta as one of the fastest growing companies. And we’re happy to provide free user testing for all their ski trips.
Technical specifications
Drupal version:
Drupal 7.x
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
These modules were chosen as Backside Tours is primarily a commerce site. We leveraged Drupal Commerce and built additional modules to extend it into the unique workflow for the user. The basic parts of commerce, cart, checkout, payment, etc were all utilized.
Community contributions:
Most of the additions to the commerce modules were every specific to the workflow, the reports, and the cool admin functionality that makes up Backside Tours. While we posted issues for certain bits and pieces we did not contribute any of our custom modules back.
Sectors:
Travel and Hospitality
