Gold Coast Party Pontoons Online Booking Website
When I was introduced to the then owner of Gold Coast Party Pontoons he told me that he was planning to sell his two boats and close the business. The business was failing because it had no online booking facility or online payment facility and was dependent on a poorly built Wordpress website with low quality images to generate email and phone enquiries. It took some convincing but the owner finally agreed to us designing a new booking website to see if we could turn the business around. This was in the month of November.
The new booking website was launched at the end of the first week in December and immediately was ranking on page one searches. It featured high quality images, clear pricing information and an online booking form. Bookings were paid for when they were made. Having the ability to take payments online turned out to be a transformative decision. Previously bookings were not paid until the day of the hire and cancellations were close to 50%. Online payments meant that the business' biggest problem, cancellations, virtually disappeared overnight.
With the booking form online, bookings and payments could be accepted 24/7. It soon became clear that the previous process of restricting potential customers to the available business hours had been costing a large amount of business and within days of the new site going live bookings were literally coming in 24/7.
The December that the site went live was an all time record for the business even though the site went live after the first week. The following January was another all time record and February was a record February and so on for the remainder of the year.
Now, the business has grown from the original 2 boats in the fleet to 6 boats with no increase in staffing levels because the website does all the bookings.
360 degree photography enhances the customers ability to visualise the actual size of the boat's interior. When we added these images phone calls dropped significantly while online bookings jumped.
