Bus Trip Quotes Website Calculator and Franchise Management Platform

Winning Formula for Tourism and Transportation Businesses

Multiple-role online platform
Instant itinerary estimation capability
Controlled private network for partners

Context

Client

A France-based tourism and bus transportation company requested a website with an itinerary calculator.

The challenge

#1. Instant bus itinerary estimate

The key project objective was to automate and optimize cost estimation for a bus service request with regard to French/European social rules and trip logistics. Since 70% of the requests qualify as ‘not planned’ (ad-hoc), the need for fast estimations is fairly high and justifies the product development. Calculating the travel cost is fairly challenging since various factors are at play:

bus type (school, excursion or other)
trip type (one-way, return, ½-day, one-day, several-day)
level of comfort (high, medium, low)
optimal route (distance, road types, tolls)
european drivers health regulations and conventions
etc.

And so automating this function will be a huge benefit for bus service companies.

#2. Franchise management platform

Building a calculator is quite an investment. To get ROI, it would be nice to be able to open the facility to other bus services as a PaaS.

Solution

User Roles

The website and calculator logic is grounded on the interaction of three user roles – the bus companies (PARTNERS), the site manager (ADMIN), and the users requesting trip quotes and taking advantage of the online calculator (USERS). Each user role comes with a set of its own authorities, functionality, and access rules.

Functionality overview

Back-office

Allows the admin to access the main website’s capabilities, to manage the system, manually update information, access the analytics data. The information available for management includes:

List of franchise partners
Map view of franchise partners
Individual partner pages
Default buses tab
Speed per bus
Pricelist
Default seasons
Booking information
List of franchise managers

The admin can view and extract the information on all bookings. They can also update the information on the site.

Franchised partners extranet

PARTNERS need a secure private space to keep their data in. The extranet allows the partnering bus companies update the information regarding their services. That’s the entry for computing a trip cost.

Each of the partners can view only their own data and can create, update, delete, access the information on:

company description
list of buses
speeds
bus stations
seasonal price changes
bookings

Frontend

A USER’s primary goal on the site is to get a quote for their trip. So their activity centers around filling out the specifics of their request. So the focal point is the calculator. Quote request automatically sends an email to one of the PARTNERS.

Other elements include the blog, ‘about us’ and ‘services’ pages, the contact form and the user account page that allows to track the request status.

Calculator

The calculator algorithm pulls the data from the partners’ extranet and adjusts the estimates to the real-time traffic and topology circumstances.

Each PARTNER is assigned a definite location, so the departure location automatically connects with one of the companies. Alternatively, Bus Privé steps in as a default option in case no other company is available.

User experience was of primary importance. Despite the calculator’s lightweight look and feel, it enables granular approach to user input. Drop-down menus, toggles, radio buttons, date pickers, spin edits, etc. allow to easily specify various trip attributes, without overwhelming users:

Trip type
Departure and arrival points
Number of passengers
Level of comfort
Date and time of departure
On-site duration

Technology

WordPress CMS is handy for user role management, franchise management, request storage, notifications, and other utility tasks.

HERE JavaScript & REST APIs – for geocoding, places autocomplete, calculating bus routes, time of the trip, etc.

Google Maps API – for visualising routes on the map, handy partners’ management.

ECMAScipt 6 (JavaScript ES6) – for improved user experience and code standards. Technically speaking, when it comes to differentiating two concepts – data to represent the state, and functions to represent the behavior – ES6 classes give us a convenient syntax for defining the state and behavior of objects that will represent our concepts.

3rd-party APIs – for generating reports.

Check out our insights in the article How to Create a Hotel Booking App.