Wilderness Reserve is a collection of luxury, restored cottages, country houses and mansions in rural suffolk. Its premium guest experience and stunning locations bring guests back time and time again – and its website should do the same. Its existing website and associated admin tools were encountering usability issues, leading to missed bookings, unnecessary work and costly overheads against sales staff, management and hosts.

Wilderness Reserve knew it needed a fix, one that would stand it in good stead to sell high-end rural retreats for years to come. It asked UIC Digital to reimagine its digital approach, to make the guest experience online as seamless, helpful and engaging as it is in person. With our expertise in digital transformations rooted in user experience, we were only too glad to help.

User experience meets guest experience

We began the project with a one-month discovery phase, getting under the skin of everything Wilderness Reserve stood for and sought to achieve with its digital offering. We observed and interviewed staff and guests, as well as taking a deep dive into existing processes and technologies that underpin its daily operations. As a result, we recommended a full digital transformation and strategy roadmap for the next two years. That meant a brand new website, complimentary iOS and Android apps, digital keys and a full back-office management system.

What this gave Wilderness Reserve was a wholly new and improved digital guest experience. A brand new website design, with a suite of new features, meant booking and paying for houses was now easy and, importantly, without missed bookings. Guests could plan and buy their food, drinks and activities, as well as inviting other guests to join them during their stay too.

A set of iOS and Android apps gave guests the ability to manage their stay remotely, including activity bookings, catering and any admin like filling out disclaimer forms for activities (axe throwing, for example).  They also became digital keys for gaining access to their property, reducing packaging and carbon footprint as well as being incredibly hard to lose!

The back-office management system included a custom-built CRM, new booking engine, bespoke activity configurator and staff management tools. It gave staff the option to take bookings over the phone, over email or even over WhatsApp, using an interactive property availability calendar. Activity pricing, staff requirements, in-activity purchases – even variable property pricing models – can now all be manually set and then fed into the new booking engine, which changes what guests see on the website.

Built for the future

From a tech perspective, we built its new digital products from the ground up, completely brand new and free of existing systems. We aimed to build a flexible and scalable tech stack aligned with the expertise in-house at Wilderness Reserve. We built the backend infrastructure on top of Azure Cloud to leverage its fully-managed services, using Azure AD for authentication and authorisation, Azure Functions for serverless worker processes executing background tasks, Azure WebService to host the automatically scaled backend application and Azure AKS to build a Kubernetes cluster around the CMS behind the guest-facing website, with built-in redundancy and scalability.

The frontend web apps – the website, guest portal and back office portal – were developed with React.js and Typescript, whilst the mobile apps used React Native so we could use the same code across all frontend apps and keep things native for users. All the frontend apps access the backend using GraphQL API endpoints.

Beauty meets beauty

Overall, the project was a resounding success. A completely revamped and redesigned website made guest experience easier to serve and far more satisfying to receive. Digital keys, guest apps and activity booking portals not only gave guests more flexibility but Wilderness Retreat a greater opportunity to capitalise on secondary revenue streams. The digital transformation as a whole gave its portfolio of stunning properties the shop windows they deserve – after all, we are talking about areas of natural beauty.