Our awesome clients: Rickshaw Travel
The friendly bunch over at Rickshaw Travel UK have been a client of ours since 2014. The Brighton-based travel company are constantly providing us with wanderlust with their incredible looking holidays, which are all hand-picked. From bite-sized trips to fully fledged itineraries including excursions, transport, and accommodation, Rickshaw Travel is ready to make whatever travel dream you have a reality.
Rickshaw Travel aims to give you more than just a holiday, which is why, alongside their bite-sized trips and ready-made itineraries, they are also prepared to tailor your booking to exactly what you need. Their key to making a holiday perfect is to make it meaningful, so they do everything in their power to make sure they can achieve this for you. Their specialists, for example, don’t work on commission to make sure the advice you’re given is genuine; if they don’t think something is right for you, they won’t suggest it.
As a company, Rickshaw Travel is also very conscious of the world around us. They want to empower people while looking after the planet. They provide activities for you to take part in that support and preserve local communities in their destinations. They put people first, which not only applies to their customers, but also to their employees and the people they work with around the world, creating a caring atmosphere for everyone involved.
We first got involved when we were asked to build a single replacement site for the approximately 20 individual destination-level websites they were operating. Since then, we’ve continued to work closely with the Rickshaw Travel team. We’ve implemented lots of changes, on the whole following a pattern of general support throughout the year and one big release, such as a new blog, homepage, or updated site-wide styling, just before Christmas and in time for their peak in the early months of a new year.
The site we built uses a fairly standard WordPress installation, but also involves lots of customisation around the following areas:
- Talking to their external pricing and booking systems, pulling in prices on a daily basis, and pushing quote request forms into their booking management system.
- Sending contacts to their mailing system.
- Showing different phone numbers depending on office hours and where you are in the world. For instance, the header changes if you’re in a different country because the UK office hours aren’t relevant anymore. If the office is closed in the evening or on the weekend, the phone number won’t show up, instead an alternative contact link will present itself. Users in Australia, Canada, Ireland, and the USA are also detected and shown local phone numbers as opposed to the standard UK number.
- Optimising part of the conversion flow and building the site to work well with their marketing and conversion tools (such as A/B testing tools and live-chat platforms).
Finally, we also have some ongoing projects with Rickshaw Travel. They are mid-way through a rebranding set to launch in summer 2020, which has given us the rare opportunity to update large amounts of styling on a site without rebuilding the underlying architecture. The rebranding is being led by Sarah at Borderless, who we have worked with on many other projects. We’re also working on improving pagespeed, especially around reducing the impact of poorly-performing third-party scripts, and around reducing database weight that has built up over five years of development. These improvements to page speed and brand are on track to improve the user-experience as well as improving the on-site SEO.
We’ve had a great time taking on these challenging but fulfilling tasks for Rickshaw Travel. They’ve given us a chance to keep pushing ourselves higher, all the while being great and fun to work with. We can’t wait to see what this awesome client of ours has in store for us in the next decade.
