Tripaneer
Vacation booking service
Tripaneer is the world’s leading marketplace to explore and book travel experiences, such as mindful yoga retreats, adventurous safaris, epic surf camps, and much more.
- Over 140,000 trips booked through Tripaneer
- Around 60,000 visits per month, from all over the world
- Live exchange rates imported from the European Central Bank
- Over 1,000 vacation packages in 80 countries
Story Behind
Our customer, Robert Den Hollander, believes that travel experience lets people discover their abilities and increases happiness and personal growth.
The project started in July 2012 under the name eBooking Services and was later renamed to Tripaneer. The application covered three subordinate websites - for booking martial arts training camps and holidays, for yoga retreats, and culinary vacations. Therefore, we had to develop four websites - the parent site and its three children. According to the original idea, in total, the websites offer over 1,000 vacation packages in 80 countries. These websites also combine reviews and booking features.
Anadea work on Tripaneer
After the project requirements review, it was decided to implement the online service with Ruby on Rails and Mongo database. Mongo DB was a move away from the tried and true MySQL. It was chosen by Robert personally, he believed that this new and modern database would provide high flexibility. As software engineers, we were happy to try a new promising technology in production mode.
According to the customer's design brief, our task was to create a visual style that should be trustworthy so that visitors feel comfortable leaving their payment details. Users should be able to find the most attractive trips in just a few clicks. It should have lots of white space, little and short texts, large fonts, simplicity, strong navigation. After a few exchanges with the customer, we finalized the mockups.
Challenges
A good example is a fallback algorithm for showing topic pages when a user plays with filters. For example, when the user is looking for martial arts campuses in New York, the application shows a special topic related to New York. But if such a topic has not been entered into the system by admins, the application has to show a topic related to the United States.
In the next releases, the tech stack was upgraded to the latest versions of Ruby and RoR. The project also migrated to PostgreSQL, which helped to handle a more sophisticated logic, accelerate the development, and the application itself.
Main Features
Smart list of trips
Recommendations mean much in the traveling industry, and Anadea made so that users view the most popular trips first. Also, there’s a possibility to sort by trip duration, price, reviews, and a number of other options.
Search & Filtering
Website visitors use trip categories, the calendar, and destination filters to place an inquiry for a trip tied to a specific arrival date, activity type, and country. Text search is also available on the Home page.
Messaging system
After choosing the trip, website visitors send the request and a message in their personal account to a merchant. Users can also login with Google Account, or via social network API/authentication pages.
Currency converter
Another noteworthy feature is the currency converter. A user can see any price in 30 currencies. The application uses live exchange rates imported from the European Central Bank. A default currency is determined by a user's IP address.
User reviews for listings
After the trip, users can review what they like or don’t like about their traveling experience. These reviews are helpful for other users and trip providers (partners).
Admin backend with a workflow for new deals
We have also developed a specific workflow for listings - every listing has to pass certain stages before it is approved by the administrator. When a merchant creates a new trip, it should be processed in the admin backend. It can be approved, published, unpublished, or deactivated. The listing can change its state at any time, for example, when the merchant decides to update some information related to the trip.
Customer support
Customer support is organized to help users reach the goal of their visits, find the needed information, or get some extra on the uncovered ones with FAQ.
Testimonials
Services &
Technologies
Design
Front-end development
Back-end development
Project management
Quality assurance
Technology stack
Ruby, Ruby on Rails, MongoDB, PostgreSQL
We chose Anadea because Anadea stood out as the best option from the start. After successfully delivering the application, we even better believe that they are the best choice.
With Anadea you get a complete organization with great project management methods, tools, and working standards. I have been involved in many IT-projects and I have never experienced a project that went as smoothly as this one.
We have used agile software development methods. This means that we can manage our user stories on a tracker tool. We are able to update them, change priorities, and contact the assigned developers directly. Even more than that, every time we encounter some problems, all the developers are available to chat and Skype.
I have also experienced it as extremely positive that they offer all disciplines needed to develop a website. Besides the main Ruby on Rails development, all the design work, HTML coding, and server setup was done by Anadea. The developers that worked for my project were all very friendly, easy to communicate with, extremely professional, aiming for high quality, and reliable.
More than Just a Solution
Tripaneer is constantly growing and adapting to market needs and high demands of users. Anadea, a travel software development company, is happy to be helpful to Robert Den Hollander with his project, who we thank for his good recommendations and our successful partnership experience.
Contact us
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Send us your request for proposal, and we'll reply with the estimate.