StayVista. 97% increase in conversion rate from checkout to payment.

Our aim was for travellers to find villas that perfectly matched the kind of vacation they wished to take faster. So, we reimagined the search-process by introducing features like grouping ‘Collections’ of similar properties together, displaying amenities through icons instead of lists, creating an intuitive search-bar, and introducing nudges that help keep the user on course.

Booking holiday villas online can be a cumbersome task, particularly when the booking involves larger groups with varied needs. To add to that, if the booking is taking place on a mobile screen, which lacks the freedom of easy toggling between multiple tabs, a clear visual design is essential. Based on our consumer research, we introduced some features that could facilitate remote decision-making, particularly for groups.

Keeping in mind that the average ticketing price for StayVista properties is relatively high, it was essential to establish trust. We decided to deliver crucial information upfront in the listing cards as well as in the inside pages. This played a key role in reducing offline dependency.

To reduce offline dependency, we introduced features like ‘pre-recorded voice note’, where villa managers can help users with last-mile directions, nudges that guide the user throughout the booking journey, and a booking modification feature that is easy to navigate making it a complete digital experience, up to and beyond the last mile.

Keeping the consumer needs in mind, the website building had a CSS-based approach with a well-structured design system and modular components. The entire technology focussed on improving page loading time, preparing for integration readiness and ensuring that the website performed well while providing a seamless experience across pages.

Enabling cross-platform integration

Since StayVista is a content-heavy website, the focus was on delivering a simple, clean and straightforward website without too many heavy animations and on-scroll interactions.

One of the strategies toward creating a website that loaded quickly was to rely heavily on CSS for most of the animations and interactions. We explored ways of using CSS instead of Java script for certain behaviours like tab-switching for which we would normally use Java script. Preferring CSS to Java script also helped reduce the First Contentful Paint time for the website.

We created a design system which offered a library of predefined, reusable components. This design system accelerated the pace of building the website and enhanced consistency platform-wide.

Reducing load-time

The front-end for the StayVista website was to be handed over to the client for integration. So, a lot of the development was driven toward creating robust components that wouldn’t break when integrated.

We created style-specific as well as behaviour-specific components which helped immensely in improving the overall quality and performance of the code. This also helped when a common behaviour needed to be changed across differently styled components.

Some components like the stay planner and the calendar component were quite complex and served as learning opportunities to extend our coding abilities.