How Shades Tours teamed up with Uplab to develop a customTour Booking App and scale it to a white-label solution
Domain:
Tourism
Collaboration:
05/2022 - 03/2023
Country:
Austria
Team size:
3
challenge:
Our client, Shades Tours, is a company that offers excursions in Vienna on socially polarizing topics, such as drug addiction, immigration, and homelessness. The special thing about such tours is the city guides, who know Vienna from a different perspective and let people discover the often unseen side of the city.
As the popularity of such an unusual concept grew, the company faced a major problem – they had to handle a constant stream of clients and make the whole booking process more efficient and streamlined. Existing tools helped with booking individual tours, but the process of scheduling private group tours was still manual and tedious, and it was impossible to find a solution that would offer all the needed features. So, Shades Tours reached out to Uplab to create an efficient web app that would optimize the tour booking processes.
project evolution:
We developed a custom app that automated tour booking and customer communication, integrated with a third-party system and gave the possibility to fully control all the business processes. But that’s not the end of the story. Satisfied with the results, our client decided to scale the product and create a white-label solution on the basis of our software. Uplab became a perfect partner for scaling the app and customizing it for the needs of similar businesses.
So, how did things turn out?
Find out the details
Project highlights
Created a web app to streamline the tour booking process.
Developed a clickable prototype of a mobile app for tour guides.
Built an email generator that fully automated communication with Shades Tours' clients.
Integrated the solution with a third-party booking software, surpassing the limitations of its API.
Scaled the app to a white-label solution to attract other businesses.
Inefficient work processes and lack of functionality: a custom tool needed
When we first met with Shades Tours, the company was using a complex system of tools combining Google Forms, Google Sheets, WhatsApp, Gmail, and Bookingkit.
The typical workflow looked as follows:
- 1Customers had to fill out a Google Form with a request to book a tour.
- 2Shades Tours' manager manually collected the data and put it into Google Sheets.
- 3The manager manually emailed the client with a notification before the tour.
- 4After the excursion was done, the guide had to reach out to the group to gather their feedback.
Quite a long list that could take a lot of time, don’t you agree?
Email generator to fully automate communication with the clients
To automate sending emails with information about the booked tours, we developed a custom email generator that selects the necessary data (tour topic, place, time, and so on) and sends it to the client right after they finished booking.
The tool chooses a template depending on the type of excursion: for example, for school tours, it sends instructions for the parents, and for single tours, it sends notifications about the place and time of the tour. These automated templates allowed Shades Tours to greatly reduce the time spent on communication with the clients and create a notification system that works perfectly without any need for human intervention.
API integration to combine all the booking tools in one
The primary objective for developing a custom tool was to integrate with Bookingkit, which our client actively used. This API integration was the major milestone in this project. And here we faced a major problem – while the platform has its own API, it doesn’t allow multiple bookings for the same time slot, which makes group excursions – our client’s main service – impossible.
To solve the problem and enable multiple bookings for the same time slot, we created a custom module with an algorithm that automatically breaks the time of bookings by seconds. With it, we surpassed the limits of the Bookingkit’s API: the tool can now quickly adjust the time and automatically identify the appropriate slot, allowing for the creation of multiple tickets for the same slot. This workaround became the ultimate solution for our client and greatly improved the work process.
Clickable prototype of a mobile app for the tour guides
The last stage of our client’s work process is receiving feedback from the guides after the tour is done. We decided to create a mobile app that would combine all the needed features: show guides their schedule, notify them about upcoming tours, and gather feedback.
For that reason, we developed a clickable Figma prototype according to our client's vision. We worked with the business analyst and UI designer to ensure the needed functionality. The app is not ready yet, but we've made an estimation and are ready to start the development.
Moving to a white-label product to help other businesses
After the development stage was done, our collaboration with Shades Tours didn't end – in fact, the most interesting part has just started. Seeing the benefits of our solution, Shades Tours decided to devise a new business strategy and extend the application's use to a broader scope. As many travel companies face problems similar to our client's and there are no solutions to fit their needs fully, Shades Tours now offers a white-label solution that can be fully customized to cover the unique needs of any travel business.
results:
- Seamless booking system
- New stream of revenue
- Reliable team to grow the product
Their smartness and professionalism were impressive.
What I found to be very special was their genuine interested in this project and I felt that they dearly identified with it. Always thinking ahead with a strategic and analytic mind. They perfectly understood the task and I loved how they were not only waiting for my inputs but showed their own thoughts, ideas and solutions. Their smartness and professionalism were impressive.
Perrine Schober
CEO & Founder, SHADES TOURS Vienna
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