Whilst undertaking the design and development of the new Wilderness Reserve guest website and apps (please see here for more details), UIC Digital were also tasked with designing a brand-new back office management platform, including a custom CRM, new booking engine, bespoke activity configurator and staff management tools. 

Learnings from a 1-month discovery phase highlighted shortcomings in the existing systems and processes as well as informing the design of new tools and capabilities required to facilitate the offerings available through the new guest website and apps.  

Bookings can be taken on the phone or via email and made through a bespoke, interactive property availability calendar. Activities, from the simple to the complex and be completely customised and configured, allowing Wilderness Reserve staff to set pricing, availability, staffing requirements and additional ‘in-activity purchases’, amongst many other things.  

Complex and variable pricing models can be applied to each individual property which in turn feed into the booking engine presented on the guest website.  

Permission-based access to features and content enable each staff member to have a customised view of their schedule and activities.  

Tech Stack 

Our aim was to build a maintainable, flexible and scalable solution using a technology stack that is aligned with the expertise of the in-house technology team at Wilderness.   

The backend infrastructure was built on top of Azure Cloud to leverage its fully managed services, such as Azure AD and AD B2C for authentication and authorisation, Azure Functions for serverless worker processes executing various background tasks, Azure WebService to host the automatically scaled backend application, Azure AKS to build a Kubernetes cluster around CMS behind the marketing website with built in redundancy and scalability.

All application data is persisted in a PostgreSQL database cluster to achieve a greater resilience. The infrastructure was created and updated via continuous delivery pipelines using Infrastructure-as-code and powered by Azure DevOps services. The backend system, which provides a centralised data access, business logic and API layers is built with .net core (c#) framework. 

The back office management and booking engine supported the new suite of guest applications, designed and developed in parallel to enable a bespoke digital service for Wilderness Reserve guests.

View more Wilderness Reserve work here.