Travel Butlers, African Safari Holiday Specialists - Google Maps development

Travel Butlers provide tailored holiday packages in South Africa and the neighbouring countries.  Traditionally their website development had been done in-house but they needed some advanced Google Maps API programming to push their site forward and make the experience for their customers that little bit better.

Working together with Travel Butler's director Paul Campbell, Surrey Business IT produced a module they could bolt-on to their existing website and infrastructure that would automatically generate a number of different types of Google Map; from details of attractions in specific regions to itineraries for individual bespoke holiday packages.

Having successfully built our own website and booking system in-house, the idea of out-sourcing any programming work to a third-party was something that we were initially resistant to.   

 

In the end, our hand was somewhat forced when our in-house programmer started to run into difficulty with a new module that we wanted to add to our booking system, and we turned to Dixcart for help on getting this implemented.  

 

This turned out to be one of the best business decisions we made in 2010!

 

The idea we had was to provide our clients with an accurate map of their itinerary including driving routes and any flights that were required.  We already had something in place that would place hotels on a map, but we needed to add all the travel elements and the ability to alter the dimensions and styling of each as required. 

 

As all of our holidays are tailor-made to each client’s individual requirements, the only way of achieving these aims was to write a module that would take a data feed from our website and dynamically create the appropriate map using the Google Maps API.

 

We could not be happier with the work that Dixcart undertook for us on this project:  they took the time to understand what we wanted to achieve and helped us make sure that the brief for the work was as accurate as could be.  The programmer who worked on the project had excellent business sense as well as technical skills, and he was even able to suggest enhancements to the system that we had not initially considered - this was very impressive and a welcome bonus!

 

Most importantly, the whole project was delivered on time and on budget, and the system has worked brilliantly since implementation was completed.

 

Based on our experiences, we will definitely be looking to use them again in the future and I’d be delighted to recommend them to anyone else.

 

Paul Campbell, Travel Butlers Ltd

 

If you have an advanced feature you would like added to your website, even if you have an in-house development team, Surrey Business IT can help.  We will always work to ensure our solutions fit seamlessly into your existing infrastructure and require minimal effort from in-house programmers to implement.  Give us a call on +44 (0)01372 28 28 28 or email sayhello@itinsurrey.co.uk.