Travel Bookings with Gravity Forms

One of our clients, who are a travel agency, needed to expand their Gravity Forms implementation for travel bookings. They had been collecting information and completed bookings on their site for some time. Their goal was to expand the information that they collected. This was to provide more automation to their internal processes and give their users more immediate cost feedback.

Complex Travel Booking Data

The travel industry has some of the most specific booking requirements around. You’re combining flights with hotel stays, tours, bus schedules, boat departures, and more. Add in a layer of departure dates and times and this complexity can escalate quickly.

There can be a high degree of intricacy attributed to the traveler as well. For example, a group of travelers where one individual wants a private room can work against the logic that tries to provide the minimum amount of rooms for a booking. A standard shopping cart solution does not fit the bill to solve this issue. 

We needed to come up with a way to collect all of the information, assign pricing to each component, and present that information to the user as they progressed through the booking experience.

Customizing Travel Bookings

There are some definite positives to using Gravity Forms for our approach. First, collecting all of the information in a single form keeps the store architecture very lean. The site is very performant and doesn’t have any unnecessary overhead, like shipping components or tax engines, which aren’t necessary to this particular industry.

Next, the client is working with a tool that they’ve already been using in other aspects of their website. Their contact forms were already using Gravity Forms so they were familiar with how to use the plugin’s interface. By not adding to the plugin stack we were less likely to impact any optimization for the site.

Using the existing set of actions and filters within Gravity Forms, which is geared towards development, we were able to customize the form in a way that better served the needs of both our client and their customers. It’s a far easier experience for the end user, and a smoother process for the admins.

Also, the stripe integration with Gravity Forms is a polished piece of code making the purchasing component of this module solid and dependable. Finally, support for Gravity Forms is readily available so when our client has questions they can go straight to the source.

A Custom Gravity Forms Solution

Now, our client is able to focus on providing better travel bookings for their customers. They can now review all of the booking information on their own time without feeling rushed. The travelers can make decisions in the comfort of their own home. Additionally, this tool helps shorten the sales cycle and potentially increases completions overall because their purchase system is available 24/7. This methodology won’t work for every industry. But in the case of travel bookings, Gravity Forms was a great solution.

If you have a need for a customized Gravity Forms project, or have questions about your current forms use, reach out to us. We’re happy to review and discuss your project or build a new workflow that makes sense for your business.

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