Armandi Travel

A premium Mobile App catering for exclusive travel experiences.

Type
Mobile App Development
Sectors
Travel, Tourism, Hospitality, Entertainment, Leisure
Technologies
Ionic, Cordova, Angular, CodeIgniter, Firebase, PHP, MySQL

Developing a standout mobile app for an exclusive travel experience

Armandi Travel offer travel packages with a twist. They offer a different way of travelling and experiencing tours, by partnering up with celebrities such as Rudy Pankow and Keemokazi, to name a few.

Through these partnerships they offer fans exquisite and memorable opportunities by participating in tours that are designed by Armandi Travel and hosted by these celebrities. How cool is that? It is surely every fan's dream to visit an exotic location, doing awesome activities with their celebrity idol.

These trips are designed for ""maximum fun"", and are jam-packed with fun itineraries. Fans can relax and know that they are in safe hands with Armandi Travel taking care of everything from travel, accommodation and daily activities.

CAN TOO MUCH EXPOSURE BE A BAD THING?

Armandi Travel had up until recently only made use of their website to market their tours and process bookings and payments. However, there was one major problem (more on that later). Picture this, the celebrity (that has millions of fans on social media) hosting the tour sends out a message to their fan base on Tik Tok, Instagram, Twitter and/or Facebook and instantly causes a colossal wave of interest and excitement with their fan base.

This is all good and well, getting loads of hype about a tour they’re hosting but in reality, many of these fans are too young to book a tour, let alone be interested in one. The knock-on effect of this mass hype was that their website became bombarded by millions of teenagers wanting to see what the fuss was about, causing the website to crash and strain under the tsunami of traffic.

The ripple effect meant the small amount of serious and genuine buyers weren't able to access the site to book their tour or simply browse the available tours. This essentially brought Armandi's business to a halt until the traffic subsided, sadly the genuinely interested quickly lost interest.

USING A MOBILE APP FOR SERIOUS BUYERS ONLY

Armandi realised that the current model wasn't working and had negative repercussions for all parties involved. They needed to do something different to achieve their end goal of showcasing their tours and allowing fans to book and pay.

This lead to the thinking of using a mobile app to facilitate the entire process. The clever idea of making this a paid app ($50 at launch) meant only serious buyers would download and install the app to book a tour with the celebrity of their dreams.

Elemental was selected as the mobile app development company to build and launch the app. The app itself is fairly simplistic, with the user being able to view all tours available and a plethora of information about each tour. This included the full itinerary, a gallery of images showcasing the hotspots that were to be frequented (as they say a picture is a thousand words) and information related to the logistics.

Booking and paying for the trip was designed to be a fast and efficient process, with various short steps used to capture the user's details and finally a payment step, allowing the user to pay either a deposit payment (to secure their spot) or the full payment. Paypal was the trusted Payment Service Provider, with which the mobile app integrated to process credit card and Paypal payments

A SMOOTH TRANSITION TO THE MOBILE APP FOR USERS

Armandi Travel's target market falls into the bracket of predominantly Millenials and Generation Z. These generations are accustomed to high-tech and multiple information sources, making them extremely tech-savvy.

This made the acceptance and adoption of using their website as a marketing and booking engine to a mobile app very easy.

In fact, in the case of Generation Z users, they're practically always on their mobile phones, so this transition to using a mobile app fell right into their hands.

The feedback since the launch of the mobile app has been great, it works faster than the website and its simplistic User Interface (UI), gives users the easiest path to exploring the tours that are on show and booking them instantly.

The app never buckles under huge amounts of traffic and performs admirably regardless of the number of users using it simultaneously.

We've certainly enjoyed developing and launching this app, which is available for Android and Apple devices.

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INTERESTING FACTS

As part of the booking process, we require users to digitally sign as a confirmation. This little feature was solved by implementing the Ionic Signature Pad.

One more complexity with the booking process allows users to either book for themselves or as a group. Further options include full or partial (deposit) payments that the user can choose. This meant that we had to develop a multi-layered dynamic form. What this means is that the forms dynamically generate the correct fields and steps based on different choices as selected by the user. It looks simple to the end-user but the underlying tech is a lot more complex!

WE LOVE A GOOD CHALLENGE

There were a few challenges that we encountered along the way but there's no better feeling than coming up with cool solutions to these challenges. Our clients also revel in this feeling too, knowing that we've got their back.

The biggest challenge we faced was that the IOS Cordova PayPal SDK was deprecated (discontinued), meaning we couldn't use Paypal's built payment solution. No problem! Our solution was to create a payment system on a backend secure webpage and then load this page through an in-app browser (with all the necessary security tokens) to allow the user to make the payment for their trip. Users are none the wiser as to this solution as it works seamlessly.

Another issue was a limitation of the IOS version of Ionic and the ability to submit forms with huge data. Passport photos were the main culprit to this huge size, so we devised a solution whereby users simply email a copy of their passport and not submit this through the form. This was more convenient for users as they don't always have their passports with them but didn't want to miss out on the chance to make a booking quickly.