Go Real Europe isn’t just a catchy slogan – it’s the name of a travel agency that offers foreign tourists the chance to discover the real Europe, not just the queues at tourist attractions and luxury shopping boulevards. Last week we launched a new website offering a unique service: the team at Go Real Europe will plan a tailor-made trip to Europe for you, taking care of all the arrangements.
The story of travelling to the real Europe, or what you don’t do yourself…
The travel agency’s founder, David, is a native American who married into a Czech family. And because his wife loved trips, they visited Central European sights together. But family trips are a far cry from a transatlantic travel agency. The photos from their trips enchanted David’s parents, but they were daunted by the prospect of a trip to Europe
. Just converting kilometres to miles, a different transport system, public transport – all of this caused them worry. You want to enjoy your trips in retirement, not add to your worries.
Besides, tourists often have a distorted sense of distance
. For example, they believe that Prague to Paris is a day trip. Imagine the disappointment when, on the train, you realise you won’t be in Paris for another 9 hours?! Booking a hotel from the train probably isn’t going to be much fun. You can’t really blame them. Be honest: do you know exactly how far São Paulo is from Rio de Janeiro?
That’s how the idea was born to set up an agency that would employ local guides who know the ropes and can organise the trip. When you travel with Go Real Europe, all you have to do is catch your flight. The travel agency will arrange the itinerary, guides, hotels according to your wishes, tickets for local transport and so on. Go Real Europe
first began operating in the Czech Republic in 2008
.
The journey to the website
If you want to introduce tourists to new destinations, you need to entice them with a well-designed website. We all want to see enchanting photos of sun-drenched landmarks. At the same time, however, you must also offer them a highly intuitive user experience. Because planning a holiday should be fun, not a journey through UX hell.
The main task was to design a trip generator. On the new website, every user can select destinations and hobbies, and the system will suggest a holiday itinerary. You can download and print this without using the services of a travel agency.
“In my opinion, the trip planner is the website’s greatest benefit,” says Daniel, an online solutions consultant. In fact, he says you can plan a trip yourself – give it a go here.
We spent hundreds of hours coding
the website, but we’re thrilled with the result. The biggest challenge? According to coder Lukáš
, it’s the internal structure: “In the admin panel, the pages are interconnected in a complex structure. The most challenging part was devising a mind map of how the pages would interact with one another.”
It was also necessary to organise dozens of standard pages of text so that travellers weren’t unnecessarily overwhelmed. It was precisely because of the complex structure that the website gave us a few headaches. So much so that the developers tried organising a hackathon
– a sort of developer retreat. They worked over the weekend and through the night. Take a look at the clock – this is how things were going at 7 am after the overnight hackathon. But they fine-tuned the final details of the website’s internal structure.
Thanks to this, travellers will find, for example, perfect information about a destination on the site – including the language, currency and exchange rate, and the current weather. The exchange rate, time and weather are automatically updated via a script.
Incidentally, the internal linking also ensures that pre-prepared itineraries with day trips near cities are displayed correctly – in this case, on the page dedicated to Krakow.
We’re delighted with the result, but so is the client. On Monday, we handed over the project and showed Go Real Europe’s marketing manager Eva how to use the content management system.
On Tuesday, we launched the website live. We even got some confetti to celebrate.
The kind that comes in a tube and can be fired off. In a nutshell? They make a terrible mess; next time we launch a project, we’d rather pop open a bottle of champagne. We wish Go Real Europe many enthusiastic clients, and we wish tourists as many wonderful experiences as possible 🙂
You can find the new website at www.gorealeurope.com
