Challenges

The brief, at first, seemed simple: to create a beautiful and user-friendly experience for booking accommodation at YHA’s hostels around the UK.

As Microserve and YHA planned and scoped the project, however, it became apparent that this was no small undertaking. Numerous technical challenges would need to be solved, including various integrations and a solid e-commerce platform. The project team were also aware that this website was just the first of a roadmap of digital properties that YHA were planning to build, and some of the content on the site might be required by other sites and apps in future.

Since YHA’s hostels are central to everything it does, any future digital products (including the main website) would need to include content about the hostels: locations, facilities, media files, nearby attractions and general information. Duplicating this data for each future digital product seemed technically clumsy and would be difficult to maintain. YHA needed a solution that would eliminate duplication of effort and data inconsistencies.

The decision was therefore made to build a ‘headless content hub’, serving as a central repository of all hostel-related content and files, capable of serving data via Drupal’s RESTful Web Services API, initially to the main website, and in future to any digital products that YHA might roll out. Abstracting the Hub content from the main site made it future-proof and ensures that it can continue to do the important job of serving content to all YHA’s digital properties for years to come, even if the main website is replaced or renewed.

‘The Hub’ is built on Drupal 8 and serves content to the new yha.org.uk (also a Drupal 8 website) via API. Content is automatically synced from the Hub to main website whenever changes are made, so admin users and customers alike can be sure there’s a reliable single source of hostel-related data.

The main website itself contains all the features and functionality you would expect from a modern accommodation booking website. It presents the hostels in the best possible light: it is image-rich, intuitive, and works equally well on devices with large or small screens. The powerful search and filtering features enable customers to find the most suitable hostel, whatever the purpose of their trip.

One of the most technically challenging aspects of the project was integrating the site seamlessly with two key business systems: Microsoft Dynamics CRM (for storing user profile data) and ASSD (which manages pricing and availability of all accommodation). Both systems required deep and complex integration work in order to display up-to-date availability on all products, and to ensure a 'single customer view' was maintained for all users.

Besides the challenges of building such a technically ambitious website, Microserve also needed to ensure that the user experience across the site was focused on delivering meaningful results. One innovative idea to drive donations was to add a ‘microdonation’ option during checkout, inviting customers to make a small charity donation on top of their accommodation fees, which goes directly towards YHA’s charity initiatives.

A key challenge was therefore to simplify the membership purchase UX with an accessible and dynamic solution, which shows the value of membership at the right point in the user journey and encourages repeat on-site bookings. With ambitious plans for digital transformation in the wider digital roadmap, it was also important that the website was engineered to provide the foundations for future innovation.