Stand alone booking solution
Himachal EcoTourism Society, Dept of Forest, Govt of HP, operates hundreds of rest houses, many at prime locations and some of which are heritage properties. However most of these properties were under utilised and generated almost no revenue for the dept. Also for commoners / nature lovers, booking these rest houses was almost out of reach.
When Svaksha was engaged to redesign the old non functional website of HP ECOSOC, we proposed to enable online / offline booking of select prime properties and launch the site in phased manner. The very idea of booking the forest rest houses faced lot of initial resistance within the dept however got necessary support from the visionaries and was successfully launched on 1st Jan 2018.
The process and the results
We were asked to give a new life to the the old rudimentary site and add booking features. That was all the requirements.
We divided the project into phases and focused on enabling both online and offline accommodation booking in the first phase. A major challenge was to integrate split payment feature which was being implemented for the first time even by the payment gateway vendor. We ended up fixing lot of vendors issues before finally launching the online booking facility .
Within the first two month the site generated revenue of 2 lakhs for the dept and till date since its launch in Jan 2018, the site has earned mroe than 20 lakhs for the dept.
- More than 50 select properties brought online in phase 1
- Implemented split payment feature which the payment gateway vendor too had never used before.
- Developed the platform to scale to 200 plus properties in phase II
- Developed the platform so as to include other features in future
Highlights / Social & commercial impact
- Generated more than 2 lakhs worth orders, within first two months of the launch of website.
- Till date has generated more than 20 lakhs worth of orders, which is a major boost keeping in mind that before the site, there was minimal revenue generated from these rest houses.
- Enabled the common man / nature lovers to directly do online bookings of prime / heritage properties some of which they had never visited earlier.
- Centralised the bookings and organised the operations
