Back-Roads Touring

Zoocha partnered with Back-Roads Touring to replace an outdated platform and create a modern, scalable digital experience that reflects the brand’s premium, off-the-beaten-track adventures

28%

Increase in bookings

14%

Increase in traffic

120%

Increase in conversion

A hilltop village at dusk with mountains in the background

The ask

Back-Roads Touring, part of the wider Global Touring Group, were operating on an out-of-date platform that no longer reflected the bespoke and tailored offering of their travel experiences. Backroads offer premium tour experiences for adult groups, they take their trips off the beaten track, experiencing the unsung heroes of the destinations they visit.

With an ambition to bring a modern brand to life in digital and begin to lay the foundations for a faster, future-proofed, and scalable digital estate, Zoocha worked with Back-Roads to transform the next step in the Global Touring digital journey.

Grid of multiple Backroads mobile page views

Backroads desktop view on a maroon background

Colourful buildings alongside a canal with boats.

The approach

We began our journey in design thinking workshops, immersing ourselves in the Backroads brand, history and digital ambitions. This allowed us to target functionality such as the booking flow, ideating on how we would be able to optimise this journey and ultimately increase conversions. User testing revealed greater appetite for visual interaction, brought to life through clickable itineraries and mapping features that help to inspire engagement with each trip.

We also tested the inclusivity of language throughout the booking flow, ensuring that we were not alienating potential audiences and maintaining excitement throughout the process.

A mediterranean seaside town next to a clear blue sea.

Technical highlights

The Backroads platform serves as the foundation for the ability for Global Touring to centralise their Drupal estate of sites that are mostly similar, but operating independently. This allows Global Touring to bring their sites into one shared codebase, increasing the maintainability and efficiency of development from a technical standpoint. This has already added value to the Global Touring team, with the Grasshopper platform brought under this umbrella earlier this year. This decreases the effort spent managing updates and upgrades, as well as dramatically reducing risk in future deployments.

The robust nature of the Backroads platform has enabled a core foundation to be shared with Grasshopper as well as accommodate the unique functional needs of the site. For example, distinct payment functionality that results in diverging checkout flows, all handled from one foundational codebase.

This foundation has been built with the aim of accommodating a vast and diverse digital estate, including app functionality due to the wealth of APIs developed to connect between the different Global Touring systems. Global Touring are now able to build and offer new services in a relatively plug and play environment, increasing independence and flexibility over their own digital estate.

Backroads mobile view on a background of the Parthenon in Athens

The results

Since going live we have recorded some strong impact. Bookings have increased by 28% (YOY) with a direct channel share improved by 2%. Throughout the inspire to purchase journey there has been a 14% increase of traffic through destination, itinerary, dates and prices pages, showing more user engagement and an increase in average time spent from 2m 24s to 2m32s.

The booking funnel page flows have seen significant improvements, with the most significant from gathering customer details to payment screen – seeing a 120% increase in conversion. Site engagement rate increased by 6% and overall the site improvements have delivered a 16% increase in traffic, more people than last year, more engaged and better conversion.