Campsited: A marketplace with a comprehensive choice of bookable campsites around the world

A Marketplace for Booking Camping Online

Client

Finán O’Donoghue

Industry

Travel

Location

Ireland

Core Technologies

Ruby Ruby on Rails AWS PostgreSQL jQuery

Campsited

A Marketplace for Booking Camping Online

Campsited is a two-sided online marketplace that helps people book camping holidays and gives park owners integrated technology solutions for marketing and running their campsites more efficiently.

Challenges

A few years ago, our client had an excruciating experience trying to book a camping trip in Europe for his family. He spent days trawling dozens of websites trying to book a trip. But none of these websites were really easy to use and none had a large selection of bookable campsites around the world. So our client decided to do something about it, and the idea for Campsited was born.

The company has been growing steadily. In 2015, the first version of the website was launched. In 2018, Campsited won the Pioneer Travel Tech Award from Enterprise Ireland. But the Campsited founders didn’t stop there. They decided to extend the functionality of the existing marketplace and make the platform more sustainable. And so began our cooperation.

Our team needed to:

Set up a streamlined development process to deliver the product as soon as possible
Come up with a strategy for managing a large amount of data
Redesign the website architecture to make the platform scalable on-demand
Extend existing platform functionality to boost customer growth
Redesign the platform to promote brand awareness and attract more users
Integrate a convenient payment system

Campsites Catalog

A convenient catalog with a wide range of filters to search any types of campsites.

Search Campsites by Country

The page features a catalog with plenty of filters for an exhaustive search of campsites in a certain country.

Campsite Overview

Campsite overview page features a detailed campsite description, photos, and ability to check available accommodation.

Campsite Reviews

People are able to view other visitors feedback about a certain campsite.

Search Nearby Campsite

The page features a convenient catalog with the opportunity to search nearby campsites.

Solutions

The RubyGarage team conducted a comprehensive analysis and came up with a solution that gives end users the most user-friendly marketplace and best overall experience.

Our main task was to implement integrations; but first, we decided to make essential changes to the website architecture to solve issues with agility and scalability.

Agility and scalability were crucial to the product’s success, as the platform has to work smoothly to deliver a pleasant experience and be helpful for customers.

We did the following:

Set up continuous integration and continuous delivery to extend the functionality of the existing marketplace and make the platform more sustainable in the shortest possible time
Refactored the project’s codebase to make the code more efficient, scalable, and maintainable
Created a convenient and comprehensive catalog with bookable campsites to improve the customer experience
Redesigned the UI/UX to make user navigation easier and increase website conversions
Integrated Google Maps so users can easily find nearby campsites
Integrated Stripe so users can instantly get and track their payments and connect their bank accounts

Technology Stack

Ruby
Ruby on Rails
AWS
Heroku
SOAP API
PostgreSQL
JavaScript
Sass
HTML5
jQuery
Google Analytics
Google Tag Manager
Google Maps
Stripe
SendGrid
Rollbar
RuboCop
Capybara
CircleCI
Skylight
Logentries
more

Results

The RubyGarage team helped Campsited make a strong pitch for the digital future of camping. We reorganized the website architecture and implemented a number of new features to extend the whole platform without compromising performance. In doing so, we provided Campsited with new business opportunities. With these changes, Campsited can meet its users’ needs by offering a comprehensive choice of bookable campsites around the world.