In its first full season, the new booking experience I built for Northern Outdoors helped shift nearly half of Northern’s reservation revenue online, up from about a third the year before, with online revenue up 37% on roughly the same website traffic.
I’m Mark, and Chaos Unlimited is me: one developer who also handles IT and security for a handful of businesses. Northern Outdoors in The Forks, Maine is one of them. This post covers what I built for them, what changed, and what the first season’s numbers show.
The starting point
Northern Outdoors is a whitewater rafting outfitter based in The Forks, Maine. They pioneered Maine’s whitewater rafting industry over 50 years ago and today run trips on the Kennebec, Dead, and Penobscot rivers, along with lodging, camping, and other activities. Reservations, inventory, pricing, and payments run on AdventureRes (ARS), a back-office system that perfectly fits their operations and that their staff know thoroughly.
Northern has some specific business rules that don’t map easily into a general purpose booking engine. For the past 20+ years Northern has needed to implement these special booking requirements through phone calls and limited the ability for some lodging and activities to be booked online.
The opportunity was the guest-facing side: the online booking pages in front of ARS. Several common bookings still needed a phone call. Peak-season Friday and Saturday lodging was phone-only. Some activities could only be booked over the phone. The Penobscot River location was booked through its own separate process, so the site directed most of those guests to call.
The approach: keep the backend, rebuild the front door
I didn’t replace ARS. Replacing a working operations system is expensive, risky, and disruptive to staff, and nothing about ARS needed replacing. AdventureRes is uniquely positioned for an adventure outfitter’s back office operations.
Instead, I built a new cart and checkout inside Northern’s WordPress site as a custom plugin that talks to ARS through its API. This approach enabled us to implement the booking rules that are unique to Northern’s business. ARS remains the single source of truth for availability, pricing, reservations, and payment processing. Staff kept working in the system they already know. Guests got a new booking experience on the main website.
I’m not a website or graphic designer. I focus on how things work, and I leave how they look to people who do that well. On this project, that was Emily Wolf of Emily Wolf Designs, who designed the look, user experience, and responsive layout of the availability calendars, the lodging and activity browse pages, and the checkout. Her design is a big reason the whole booking experience feels as clean and simple as it does, on a phone or a desktop.
Doing this well meant learning how ARS actually behaves, not just what its API documentation says. Business rules that staff used to enforce by hand over the phone now run in the checkout itself.
What changed for guests
- Both locations in one cart. Kennebec, Dead, and Penobscot trips, lodging, and camping can all be booked together in a single checkout.
- • Peak weekend lodging is bookable online. Northern requires most of a group to book an activity for peak-season Friday and Saturday stays. The checkout now checks that requirement automatically, so those bookings no longer need a phone call.
- • Lodging matched to the group. Guests start with their group size, and the system suggests the right number of rooms or cabins. The booking engine provides an easy-to-use matrix of lodging options and activities tailored to the group size with suggestions for single-unit or multi-unit accommodations and simple price comparisons.
- • Trip Cancellation Protection is a clear choice. It used to be added to every online booking. It’s now optional, with a straightforward opt-out.
- • Partner activities captured as quotes. Activities run by partners, like ATV and snowmobile rentals, save as a quote. Staff confirm availability and follow up, with the guest’s full itinerary already in front of them.
First-season results
Website traffic was essentially flat, yet a much larger share of Northern’s business came in online. Guests who booked online brought bigger groups and spent more per booking. That points to the booking experience, not extra marketing.
A few notes to be fair about these numbers:
- Booking and revenue figures come from Northern’s ARS reservation reports, by booking date, and are pre-tax. Website visits come from Google Analytics.
- Revenue per online guest rose even though a larger share of online guests were kids at discounted youth rates.
- Revenue per guest on office bookings, at the same prices, was essentially flat, so the online gain isn’t explained by price increases.
- Across phone and online combined, reservation revenue grew about 7.5%. The online gains came partly from guests who would otherwise have called and partly from new business.
- Trip Cancellation Protection became optional this season, so some online bookings no longer include it.
What this could mean for your business
If your operations software works but your customers struggle with the part they see, you probably don’t need a new system. You need a better front door to the one you have.
That idea has shaped my work for a long time. In the 1990s I was Director of Engineering at three PC peripheral companies, and helped two of them earn ISO 9001 certification. That’s no small feat in consumer electronics, where time to market is everything, and it taught me how manufacturing and operations really run. Since the early 2000s I’ve been self-employed, helping small businesses improve their ecommerce without forcing them to reshape their business around a piece of software.
That’s the kind of work I do: learning how an existing system actually behaves, then building around it so customers can do more on their own and staff spend less time on the phone. Because I’m one person, you work directly with the person writing the code, from the first conversation through launch and the season after.
Are you using AdventureRes and leaving revenue on the table?
If you want to keep the operational power of AdventureRes while modernizing your guest booking experience and unlocking higher cart values, let’s talk.