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Tourism Bay of Plenty
A complete modern DMO solution for Tourism Bay of Plenty.
Bay of Plenty Tourism found themselves in a place familiar to many – an aging website, with features bolted on over the years, that was no longer fit for purpose. Acting as one of the first points of contact for visitors to the region, their digital presence was crucial to get right.
What could a DMO website do?
We spent a lot of time with the team at Bay of Plenty Tourism discussing what the website should be able to achieve for potential visitors to the region, as well as how it could support operators. The new digital presence needed to exist in the Dream and Plan stages of the booking process – giving aspirational and educational information to travellers. There needed to be clear consideration of the key traveller types defined in the Place DNA work done by the DMO, with tailored content for each. Finally, it had to support the businesses that make up the region, providing listings and traffic back to individual websites.
A modern solution for a modern region
A more modern visual approach was needed, using an alternate logo version as well as large format images and bold headers. The natural curves of the coast and hills of the region are replicated throughout the site, creating a look and feel 100% unique to Bay of Plenty Tourism.
Content and local stories are a key building block of the website, and we wanted strong visual elements to come together to create story templates that felt individually designed when assembled by the BOP team. A number of templates were created for stories, for each audience type and story theme that would be required. These stories could now be assembled block-by-block, creating beautiful and engaging stories with cultural, historical, and ecological importance.
Visual changes are underpinned with a powerful and flexible back-end. A bespoke Operator Listing engine was created to allow listings from the Tourism New Zealand API to live alongside local listings for Cruises and Hospitality offerings. Operators will now have less places to have to maintain their listings, making it easier to keep up-to-date. The team at BOP maintain full control over the listings that show on the site, and are able to approve changes even when pulling from the TNZ API.
Integrations with tools to pull in user-generated images from social media as well as local events means that the website is always fresh, colourful and relevant. All of this sitting on the New Zealand industry-leading, open-source Silverstripe CMS. The end result is that every page is editable without time-wasting and expensive back-and-forwards with development agencies – the power is literally in the hands of Bay of Plenty Tourism.
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We're a team of tourism and digital experts who hang our hats on doing high impact work that affects your bottom line.
