We recently flipped the switch live on acacia-africa.com, a website offering exciting and affordable tours around Africa. The aim of the website is to present online visitors information on their travel destinations, from the Red Sea to Cape Agulhas, as well as news and a real-time online tour booking system.
Acacia wanted full CMS access to the websites in order to update all of the content themselves as well as the ability to upload and edit tours. The kicker was that they wanted dates, prices and availability to be automatically updated from their company database. This meant that when a price or date for a certain holiday package changed on their system, the info would need to reflect automatically on the website. This would save them time from having to manage hundreds of tour listings across two servers.
All of the above was quite a real brain tweaker, but we nodded politely, smiled, and said ‘no worries’, before going to work.
We started by building an intricate Content Management System with multiple level member login. This would allow administrators to manage and update the content securely and efficiently. When it came to the tour data that needed to change according to their offsite database, we came up with a system that connects their bookings server to our own, queries their bookings database and publishes the latest info to their respective tour pages in real-time on our server.
For the booking mechanism, a visitor could simply click a button on one of the tour pages and it would take them to a secure contact and confirmation form. In turn, when this was sent off to Acacia Africa and when payment was made, the availability of that tour would update for other online visitors. There is also a nifty IP function that deduces a visitor’s location in the world and loads the appropriate price of the tours in their local currency.
Give it a look here – www.acacia-africa.com
