We were honoured to design and develop a custom web portal system for Family Holiday Charity. Family Holiday Charity helps struggling families who are going through challenging circumstances to experience a much-deserved holiday, short break, or day trip, many of which are kindly donated by hotels, campsites, and tourist attractions.

The Challenge

Research undertaken by Family Holiday Charity reveals the devastating impact on families who miss out on summer holidays, including declining mental health and an impact on school performance. These families are referred for a holiday or day out by professionals in a supporting capacity, for example, teachers, social workers, and health visitors.

Family Holiday Charity required a new platform that enabled these professionals to complete an online application for holidays, short breaks, and day trips, on behalf of families. The system also needed to provide back-office functionality so that the team at Family Holiday Charity could review and manage these applications.

With over 20 years’ experience in travel software development, Family Holiday Charity appointed CSI Media to develop the solution.

Our Solution

We listened carefully to the client’s requirements and worked closely with key personnel at Family Holiday Charity during the initial phases. From this, we have managed to create an online platform that delivers an efficient, high-quality experience for both referrers and the back-office team.

The Referral Area

We developed a custom-designed referral area that incorporates all the functionality required to support an efficient referral process. The first step for referrers is to register. Our team created a registration form where referrers are required to enter personal details and select which organisation they are affiliated with. Once accepted, referrers can access the system where they are able to browse holidays, short breaks, and day trips. Search criteria includes:

The duration of the break

The type of break that would best suit the family, whether it’s a caravan park, glamping, a seaside adventure, city or countryside break

How the family intends to travel and whether they need a contribution towards travel expenses

The number of adults, teenagers, children, and infants

When the referrer has found a suitable holiday or short break, they can make an application on behalf of a family.

To help manage applications, referrers can log in to their account where they are presented with a dashboard. Here, they can view the progress of applications, see what breaks they have been offered, accept holidays and breaks, make further applications, download PDF versions of applications for their records, and update account details.

Once a break has been booked, the system generates reminders for families as the holiday approaches. Finally, the system requests and gathers feedback after breaks, so that Family Holiday Charity can share positive experiences and the big difference a holiday or short break can make to struggling families.

Back Office Administration

The second part of the system is the Back-Office Admin Area. This enables the Family Holiday Charity team to upload holidays, manage referral registrations, review applications for holidays, and manage content that is displayed in the Referral Area. The back office sits within an Umbraco Content Management System, providing all the required functionality and information in one area. More specifically, the team can:

• Load suppliers and products (holidays, short breaks, and day trips) into Umbraco
• Add content to each of the holidays (descriptions, photography, key information) to help referrers to choose a suitable destination for the family/families they’re representing
• Review referral registrations with the ability to accept, decline or request more information
• Review applications, see what products loaded into the system match the family’s characteristics, and send holiday offers to the family
• Send break requests to reservation teams at suppliers (hotels, campsites) for them to accept/decline; this updates the application status
• Create eVoucher templates for products which can be sent to families when breaks have been successfully booked

Additional functionality includes search functionality (applications, suppliers, products), the ability to export data on applications, products and suppliers as a CSV file, and application audit trails.

Results

The new platform has streamlined processes and massively improved efficiency at Family Holiday Charity, enabling the charity to work with more families and partners. Since the platform launched in December 2017, they have recorded the following metrics:

• 5,000 referrers have registered
• 7,000 applications have been made
• 8,000 families across the UK have enjoyed a break!

CSI Media

CSI Media is an award-winning software development agency with 24 years’ experience in building custom solutions for companies across the travel and tourism industry. If you have an upcoming web or software development project, please send your brief to enquiries@csimedia.net