Recent work:
Pura Aventura
2015-2020
Pura Aventura are an indepedent travel company based in Brighton.
They specialise in creating sustainable tailor-made holidays to Latin America, Spain & Portugal.
The project
Pura Aventura’s co-founder, Thomas, approached me to completely revamp their internal management system.
Their team puts together highly-personalised tours for their clients, which makes creating itineraries and co-ordinating with their suppliers a complex and hands-on job.
The existing system, which had served them well in the past, did not offer the flexibility they needed moving forward.
Before -- the previous reservation system
Once we had discussed the limitations of the old system, and what was needed for the future, we immediately got to work building a brand new application from scratch, using Ruby on Rails.
I’m a firm believer that a prototype is worth a thousand meetings. Getting something on screen as soon as possible and receiving quick feedback was vital.
This way of working - closely with the people who will actually use it - allowed for rapid, iterative progress to be made.
The application went live in 2015 and has been continuously developed over the past 5 years. It remains core to the operations of the business today.
The software does all the heavy-lifting when it comes to price calculation -- ensuring the correct margin is made on each holiday.
Clients’ holiday requirements are constantly changing and so flexibility was vital. We built an itinerary editing interface -- allowing both individual services and entire days to be drag & dropped, edited, or completely removed.
We built an in-depth lead tracking system, as well as a live sales board and reports area to provide insights into where the sales funnel could be improved.
Many hours of staff time has been saved by helping to generate clients’ itineraries and other documentation. This automation took nothing away from the personalised touch that is essential to their business.
The new application opened up many new possibilities for the business -- such as an online login area for their clients.
I’m extremely proud of this project -- especially knowing that the application I built as the sole developer has helped transform the way the business operates for the better.
Helping a small business and its staff solve their everyday problems was immensely rewarding for me.
Have an interesting project you need help with? My email is ed@edforshaw.co.uk