Challenge

Accommodating complex, varied user journeys seamlessly.

Lovat operates a number of different parks across many locations, each one having their own types of accommodation, pricing and types of holiday.

The considerations for a successful website are many. Facilitating transactions, managing bookings, ease of content management, ensuring a pleasurable, intuitive user search journey….

Further complicating matters is that Lovat caters to two distinct types of customer: those wanting to book a holiday, and those interested in buying a holiday home.

Lovat Holiday Parks website homepage with woodland banner, booking search bar, awards, and Holidays and Ownership panels featuring a beach and lodges.

Website mockups for Lovat holiday homes showing a homepage with a blue sofa living room, park search bar, and regional tiles for Cornwall, New Forest, Norfolk and Suffolk, beside a listings page with blue-roofed lodges and a sea-view banner.

Vision

A dynamic, custom web experience.

There was nothing ‘off the shelf’ that would come close to providing the level of performance required for a website like this. The nature of the requirements necessitated a bespoke solution, integrated with the client’s existing systems.

Lovat Holiday Parks website with a coastal cove of boats and swimmers, a booking search with an open date picker for October and November 2023, and award badges

Two smiling people in black wetsuits carry yellow surfboards across wet sand towards the camera, with grassy cliffs, waves and two more surfers behind them.

Craft

A clear technical strategy.

We developed a bespoke integration with the client’s Elite Parks Application Programming Interface (API). This would be used for a number of things:

Retrieving and refreshing essential setup data (such as what parks can be searched against for certain types of holiday, and what dates are searchable for certain parks).
Creating, retrieving, updating and adding special notes to bookings.
Tagging a booking, so it cannot be ‘stolen’ and is locked until a user’s payment fails or a time limit is reached.
Creating an ownership or holiday lead customer after they submit a contact form.
Making a request after a successful transaction on the payment gateway has occurred.
Validating an existing booking’s credentials, so a user could pay their remaining balance for a booking (having only paid a deposit initially).
Retrieving a ‘sensible weather’ quote (this is a ‘weather guarantee’ extra that users can add to their booking; it offers a reimbursement for bad weather).

Aerial view of a holiday lodge park with grey timber-clad lodges on decking, a curving gravel road, neatly kept lawns and young trees, with fields and the sea beyond under a clear blue sky.

Mockup of a holiday booking website: a Green Hill Farm Holiday Village park page beside a checkout page with extras and a booking summary.

Other custom elements of this build included GraphQL requests to retrieve ownership and holidays results on a special index page with filters.

The build also features asynchronous search results. That is, the search engine continues to work in the background, fetching and updating results as the user refines their query without the need for a new search.

The website utilises CloudFare’s full page caching with a Craft CMS Blitz plugin, with a range of page speed optimisations.

The website also makes use of dynamic imports, image transforms and critical CSS. These three elements all allow for optimised page load times and resource usage.

Another technical aspect to this build is critical CSS — the visible portion of a web page is rendered as quickly as possible.

A seamless user journey facilitated by bespoke integrations, optimised for page speed.

Smartphone showing the Green Hill Farm Holiday Village booking page: park amenities list, a photo strip, and a lodge marked "Only 1 available".

Two smiling people lean on a grey railing outside a modern cream and charcoal cabin, one with curly hair, one bearded and wearing sunglasses, with trees behind.

Deliver

Destination: excellent user experience.

Our client’s new website is dynamic, high performance and scalable — technically excellent and a dream for users and content managers. It facilitates a range of marketing activity, helping Lovat to drive ever-increasing brand awareness and sales.

Wish you were here? Get in touch with us today.