We recently said hello to the new [highlight] Acacia Africa website [/highlight]! This website was a labor of love and we are super proud to showcase it to you…
Authentically driven guest content
“Experience Adventure Tours at their Wildest with Acacia Africa” is [highlight] Acacia Africa’s [/highlight] leading tagline and the predominant theme on the new site. To do this we leveraged one of the most powerful backers of Acacia’s business – their guests.
Acacia are excellent at encouraging their guests to share their tour experiences on social media and throughout the website, guest focused content is given a podium and offers strong credibility for their brand and operation. Some examples are the [highlight] ‘Acacia Africa’ Instagram feed [/highlight] , the [highlight] Trip Advisor reviews [/highlight] as well as the striking imagery which, more often then not, showcases guests having a blast in exciting locations around Southern Africa.
The perfect tour for your requirements
When it comes to a production website of this scale, the challenge is always converting website visitors into actual Acacia Africa guests. To do this we have to present the right tours to the right person. The problem is that Acacia have over a hundred and one tours to choose from, covering multiple countries and hundreds of special interest destinations, and if we have never met you, how on earth do we know what you like?
The trick is to begin a type of ‘online interaction’ with each visitor so we can determine what tours to present them with and then help them freely explore and compare these tour options.
Being the little tech-ninjas that we are (wink wink), we came up with a crafty tool for this that allows searchable navigation in the main menu. The search-bar helps you filter out tour options as you start entering keywords. For instance, if you are an adrenaline junkie looking for adventure, you can begin by starting to type ‘shark’, into the search-bar. As you type we instantaneously dig into our database and present you with tour options. In this case, ‘shark’, returns Acacia’s Cape Town Shark Dive tour, or alternately, the option to browse other tours that have Cape Town (a staple destination for Discovery’s Shark Week) in its itinerary.
Find that perfect adventure on your own.
The search-bar is by no means an end in itself; its job is simply to help you find that perfect adventure from Acacia’s portfolio using keywords you give it. If it does not present the perfect tour match it may direct you to a tour search page with a list of possible matches. The tour search page then offers a bunch of filtering options to help your hone in on tours that best suit your timeframe, budget and interests.
On the tour search page there is a tour wish list tool that allows you to save a list of tours that you find most interesting. You can simply click the ‘Add’ to wishlist button to tag tours as you go. You can then go back and compare a choice list of tours, at your own pace. The wish list page also offers you a handy function where you can email yourself (or someone else) your wish list. This is helpful if you can’t make up your mind, right away, or need to come back to the website later to explore tour options. The email you receive will let you click on the tours when you are ready and pick up where you left off.
Booking a tour has never been this easy!
After you have found that perfect holiday and made up your mind that you want to book a slot (group booking is also accommodated) the website makes it easy to do it right from a particular tour’s page. All the prices and dates you see are updated in real time, which makes booking accurate and easy.
The new route maps are way cooler.
One of the notable side mentions about the new Acacia website is the route maps that you see on the tour pages (as well as the tour search page). Acacia’s previous website used Google Maps to display the tour’s route. We were not 100% happy with this because we found Google Maps to be quite limiting. We were looking for a better way to accurately display a route graphically, and we MapBox was the answer. Mapbox is not only prettier than Google Maps, but it comes with a comprehensive API to personalize the maps on your website. Interestingly, Mapbox only released their API a day before we started using it…making us pioneers in a sense (watch out, world).
Well, that’s enough of the tech-talk for now but we’ll end off by saying that we are all extremely excited to see how Acacia’s web visitors interact with the [highlight] new website [/highlight] . All in all the project was meticulously thought out and delivered and we are confident that it will be a winner.
Written by Brandon Bradley.