Richardsons Leisure
Bespoke booking systems, a whole brand refresh for one of the largest holiday and leisure operators in Norfolk.
Richardsons is one of the largest tourism operators in Norfolk and is still a family run business. Operating a holiday park within the costal village of Hemsby and one of the largest fleets of hire boats on the Norfolk broads, Richardsons needed a reliable website to continue to attract it’s many holiday makers from all across the country and abroad.
The requirements of both the Richardsons Boating Holidays and Hemsby Beach Holiday Park website was to fit within the new design language and integrate seamlessly with the existing booking system as well as to continue to be well optimised for user experience and SEO.
We’ve kept all of Richardsons website’s consistent by utilising child and parent themes within WordPress as well as using existing plugins blended with a suite of bespoke plugins to meet Richardsons requirements exactly.
All holiday websites were seamlessly integrated with external booking systems to pull through pricing, availability, calendars and quick buy buttons.
Having created a bespoke accommodation plugin, another requirement was the ability for guests to easily compare different types of accommodation to find what is best suited for them.
As part of the redesign and rebuild of all the Richardsons Leisure Ltd websites, I implemented in depth tracking using Google Analytics. This helps us to be able to understand how customers use the website to find their next holiday to better optimise and improve their experience.
Richardsons not only offers holidays but a variety of day trip offerings, from day boat hire on the Norfolk broads to bowling and soft play in Lowestoft. As a part of these they needed a reliable booking system to not only fit within the unique requirements but to also work with their existing payment gateway setup.
Talking with each site manager, getting to know the ins and outs of each operation we were able to create two unique booking systems for each site meeting their desired needs. These systems were built using Laravel to allow for further scope and flexibility for expansion in the future.
Creating and designing a booking system and booking flow to not only capture and convert potential day visitors but also to allow for the teams to place and manage bookings quickly and with ease.
The requirement to generate bespoke, in-depth financial reporting and analytic reports for various teams along with the function to generate in various formats and automatically sent in an email as was essential to ensure efficient performance reviews.
Alongside each booking system, we built plugins to allow for each website and booking system to work in tandem providing an effortless booking process for potential guests.
Built using the Laravel framework, the booking systems provide endless flexibility for any potential change in requirements.
We work closely with Richardsons to analyse guest behaviour on their online platforms to see how we can best optimise for conversions and allow for existing guests to find what they’re looking for. We also regularly review existing content on the site to ensure their SEO rankings remain strong.
Not only this, but we also perform general maintenance and upkeep on all Richardsons web servers ensuring everything remains up to date and secure to keep all guest and team member information safe.
Tom has worked closely with our design agency and marketing partners to successfully launch newly designed websites across our entire product portfolio, seamlessly integrating our external booking systems with WordPress. His work has produced an improved user experience, better reporting, round-the-clock support, and regular maintenance, all of which have significantly enhanced our online presence.
