Trailora
Project Story
Trailora organises guided hiking trips in national parks, and sells them almost entirely online. Their old website photographed beautifully and booked badly: visitors admired the scenery, struggled to compare trips, and telephoned with questions the site should have answered. OpenNeux redesigned the booking experience around the decisions travellers actually make: fitness, dates, group size, and what happens if the weather turns.
We interviewed past travellers and, more usefully, people who had enquired but never booked. Their hesitation was rarely price. It was uncertainty: Am I fit enough? What exactly is included? Who leads the trip? What if I am the slowest in the group? The new site was structured as a sequence of honest answers to those fears, with photography that shows real groups on real trails instead of empty landscapes shot from drones. Confidence, we learned, is the product a tour company actually sells.
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Problem
Trip pages were written like brochures and organised like filing cabinets. Difficulty was described with adjectives instead of facts, so a 'moderate' trail meant different things on different pages. Prices hid park fees and equipment costs that appeared later, and the availability calendar disagreed with the booking form often enough that staff kept a private spreadsheet as the real source of truth. On phones, itineraries collapsed into unreadable walls of text.
The business costs were concrete. Every unanswered question became a phone call or an email thread, and the small Trailora team spent its days as a human FAQ instead of improving trips. Cart abandonment was worst at the extras step, where tents, poles, and insurance appeared as surprises rather than choices explained in context. Reviews were glowing but stranded on third-party sites, invisible at the moment of decision. The founders also wanted to grow into corporate retreats, yet the site gave a company buyer nothing: no group logistics, no sample schedules, no way to request a proposal without phoning. Trailora's trails were excellent and its guides beloved; its website was a bottleneck between that quality and the people looking for exactly it. The redesign had to make the site carry the reassurance a good guide gives in person.
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Solution
Trip pages were rebuilt around a factual difficulty system: distance, ascent, altitude, and hours, shown the same way on every trip, with a short 'who this suits' note written by the guides. Prices now show the full cost from the first view, with inclusions listed plainly. Availability and booking were unified onto one data source, ending the spreadsheet era, and each page carries reviews from travellers who took that exact route.
We also designed a planning layer the old site never had: a packing list generator matched to trip and season, preparation guides for altitude and fitness, and a group enquiries flow with sample retreat schedules for corporate buyers. The extras step became part of the trip page, explained while interest is high rather than sprung at checkout. Online bookings rose by half within the first season, and routine phone questions dropped sharply.
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