First Light Travel Booking Portal

FLT wanted to streamline their tour bookings by bringing 3rd party vendors and customers into the workflow.

There were 2 main motivations driving this project:

• By giving vendors access to the booking process, FLT could drastically reduce backwards and forwards communication with the vendor while ensuring all necessary data is captured in one transparent place.
• And by having customers access the work flow, payment stages could become largely automated.

FLT already had an excellent internal booking system - but it was just that - for internal use only. Communica was contracted on to devise a booking portal which could cover the different users journeys required by the FLT sales agent, the 3rd party vendor and the customer (in direct transaction cases).

These user journeys broke down into 2 main interfaces:

The Vendor Portal
This is where a 3rd party vendor sells a Tour on behalf of FLT.

1. Here, the vendor makes a booking request on behalf of a customer, forwarding the details through to the FLT sales team.
2. The FLT agent inputs the customer’s particulars and then generates a specialised booking link which gets sent back to the 3rd party vendor.
3. The vendor can adjust the booking from there, adding extra detail and ensuring details are correct before confirming on behalf of the customer.
4. As payment in this case is handled outside of the portal (between FLT and the vendor), the FLT accounts team is in charge of changing the booking status as they receive payment. This is managed in their own internal system and automatically synced to the portal, streamlining the process for all.

The Customer Portal
This interface comes into play when a customer visits the FLT website and enquires directly.

1. Upon receiving a customer enquiry, the FLT agent builds a customised Tour quote within their internal system. This is then automatically synced into the booking portal and a quote link is generated.
2. The FLT agent then emails the customer the link, and at this point the customer has a chance to review, ask questions and amend the booking.
3. Once everyone is happy, the agent then updates the booking state to finalised and the customer can fill in the last required details and set up payment (whether in instalments or paid in full by credit card or bank transfer).

Security of the customers details was an important aspect to this build and so we’ve chosen to store all credit card details off platform in the Windcave payment gateway, retrieving them only when necessary to complete the next stage of payment.