Wilderness Reserve approached UIC Digital to improve the digital offering to their guests. The incumbent website and processes in place had numerous usability issues, in addition to creating unnecessary work and overheads for the sales staff, management and guest ‘hosts’.  

The project commenced with a 1-month discovery phase, giving the UIC Digital team an opportunity to observe and interview staff and guests as well as deep-dive into the processes and technologies that underpinned the operation to truly get under the skin of how the business was being run.   

As a result of the discovery initiative, we proposed a full digital transformation and strategy roadmap for the next two years.  

From a guest perspective, a brand-new website was designed, developed and deployed, enabling guests to book and pay for accommodation, browse and purchase food, drinks and activities, in addition to inviting guests to join them as part of their stay. 

Complimentary iOS and Android apps were built to enable guests to manage their stay (including the booking of activities and catering, signing of disclaimer forms) as well as acting as their digital key for them to gain access to their property  

Additionally, a full back-office management platform was designed and developed to compliment the guest-facing platform – full details of which can be found here.

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 frontend web applications, such as the Marketing website, Guest portal and Backoffice portal are developed with React.js and Typescript and the mobile applications use the React Native framework to achieve a high level of code reuse across all frontend apps and provide a native user experience. All frontend applications access the backend services via GraphQL API endpoints. 

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 guest applications were designed and developed in tandem with a new back office management and booking engine to enable a bespoke digital service for Wilderness Reserve guests.

View more Wilderness Reserve work here.