Tourasia.ch is a Swiss tour operator that specializes in trips to Asia and in the realization of individual travel wishes. Tourasia.ch has received multiple awards for its services. A tour operator’s website needs a particularly attractive layout that triggers the users’ travel interest with its design and excellent image quality. Quick and clear navigation through individual pages is necessary so that visitors are able to immediately grasp travel possibilities and easily get to their desired trip. Together with the lead agency, Top Line, W4 has realized the project in just six months.

The challenge

Our customers, Tourasia.ch, requested a website relaunch that provides visitors with a clear and visually attractive presentation of the many travel possibilities that can be individually combined. The company’s backend systems needed to be integrated into the website in the sense of a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Moreover, the website has to offer a powerful travel configurator and be high-performing despite a large number of images. When it comes to website relaunches, the W4 team is an experienced partner and hence was happy to dedicate itself to this project.

Technical realization – many systems, one professional website

The website, which had originally been realized with TYPO3, was implemented with the universal JavaScript framework gatsbyjs.org for the relaunch. It opens up the possibility of turning content into functional, visually attractive apps and websites. In order to do so, one can make use of data from peripheral systems. With the help of gatsbyjs.org, content can be loaded automatically and used in website creation. Moreover, it can collect markdown and data information. In the case of tourasia.ch, static as well as blog content is loaded from wordpress.com, which operates as a headless CMS. All trips are meanwhile taken from the internal trip management program as well as from TO Online, the back office program for tour operators. Mautic.org was integrated as a marketing automation email tool. Cloudinary.com is used for image management.

Users can look for their ideal trip with the help of travel filters and use the wish list to create their own trip. An offer channel with a bookmark function has been integrated. The prospect receives an overview of all travel data, like transfer, flight, accommodation, and book activities at a glance, and can download this information as a PDF file. The offer is created via the website’s connection to tourasia.ch’s systems. The newsletter subscription is part of the website, as is the marketing automation. For that, W4 has integrated the open-source marketing automation software mautic.org. 

Reactjs.org – for interactive user interfaces

Interactive elements are part of any modern website that aims to fulfill contemporary user expectations. Reactjs.org makes the development of such components, as well as quick access and updates, possible.

Apart from functionality, our developers focused mainly on creating attractive UI (user interface) components. After the implementation, all elements can be reused and adapted if need be. This clearly helps save valuable resources. By placing the focus on components, there is no need to check the whole application if changes occur. Reactjs.org provides enormous flexibility here.

Cloudinary.com – for efficient image management

Via high-quality images, tourasia.ch’s website offers visitors valuable impressions of their travel possibilities. One might assume that a high number of images influences the loading time of the web pages for the worse. This is not the case with cloudinary.com. The cloud-based image and video management system Cloudinary allows for central management and editing of data in the cloud.

Provision of data is managed via a content delivery network (CDN) that makes it quickly accessible. The loading speed of Tourasia’s website is therefore exceptionally good. A plugin, which has been developed by W4, automatically delivers the data. All images are optimized for the different (mobile) devices in an automated manner – a must-have when considering the enormous growth of website visits via mobile devices.

Ensuring success – agile project management with our UI partner and customers

The UI design was realized in cooperation with our partner topline.ch. Within the framework of agile project management based on the SCRUM framework, W4 has talked about the current state of the project, planned sprints, and discussed wishes for customization. That way, W4 was able to react flexibly to different requests and challenges as well as to constantly improve work processes. Eventually, together with the customer and topline.ch, W4 was able to realize this project within only six months in an agile way.