Collage of various travel website pages showcasing holiday offers, scenic landscapes, property interiors, and maps of holiday destinations.

Lovat Parks - website

Must visit: our bespoke website for a luxury staycation leader

Sitting towards the premium end when it comes to UK holidays and holiday lodge ownership, Lovat Parks needed a seamless, technically superior online experience that reflects their offering.

Project team

A young man with glasses, dark hair, and a beard, smiling in a room with colourful posters and artwork on the wall behind him.A young man with curly hair and a beard, smiling gently, seated against a purple cushion in an indoor setting.A young man with a beard and checked shirt sitting at a desk with a laptop, smiling against a colourful poster-filled wall.

Services provided

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.

Homepage screenshot with a forest pathway, website menu options, search bar, and sections highlighting holidays and property ownership.Collage of holiday home websites showcasing interior living rooms and exterior cottages, with beach scenes and property listings.

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.

A travel website homepage showing a scenic harbour view, search options for parks and dates, a TripAdvisor rating, and promotional banners.Two men in wetsuits with surfboards walk along the sandy beach towards the ocean, with cliffs and a blue sky in the background.

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).
A row of modern, grey cabins with small gardens and gravel paths, surrounded by green trees and open landscape under a clear blue sky.A booking webpage for a holiday park features a map, holiday details, amenities, and a booking summary with a picture of a caravan in a green setting.

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.

Mobile phone screen displaying a booking page for Green Hill Farm Holiday Village, with images and details about park amenities and availability.A happy couple leans on a balcony railing outdoors, with a modern mobile home behind them and green trees in the background, enjoying a sunny day.

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.

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