Ongoing development for a UK accommodation booking platform
Stay in a Pub helps people discover and book pubs with rooms across the UK. We have been its development partner for more than two years, improving the live platform continuously as the business changes.
The challenge
A directory and booking platform has to keep changing as supply, search behaviour and customer expectations change. Small points of friction in the journey can matter commercially even when the platform still appears to work.
Stay in a Pub needed a development partner who could improve the existing platform continuously, without waiting for a periodic redesign.
Constraints
The platform is live and trading throughout. Improvements have to ship without disturbing bookings in progress, and changes to a booking journey have to be reversible, because intuition about what will help is wrong often enough to matter.
Our approach
We release changes in small batches, which limits the risk of each one and lets the roadmap respond to current evidence from the business.
Most of the work falls into three areas: making the platform faster and more reliable, removing friction between finding a pub and booking it, and making the content useful for searches that start with a place or circumstance.
What we built
The booking journey
We remove unnecessary steps and ship changes in small enough batches to see their effect on bookings and reverse them if needed.
Findability
Content and structure built for searches that start with a place or circumstance, which reflects how people look for somewhere to stay.
Technical detail
The platform runs on bespoke WordPress with custom post types for properties and availability, integrated with the booking and payment systems behind it.
Performance work has focused on phones with weak connections, where slow pages and failed requests can interrupt a booking.
Changes go out continuously behind a deployment process that makes reverting a single change cheap.
- PlatformBespoke WordPress
- IntegrationsBooking and payment systems
- CadenceFrequent, incremental releases
- FocusJourney friction and findability
- SupportOngoing development partnership
“Since working with Branch, traffic to our website has increased by 56% and paid bookings have increased by 15%, with the average value up 12%.”
CEO, Stay in a Pub
Discuss ongoing development and support
Tell us about the platform, the current development arrangement and the improvements waiting to be made.