Website with online booking system for Southern Spirit: 12,539 bookings completed

Southern Spirit Lago Argentino is a concessionaire of Los Glaciares National Park and operates cruises to the Perito Moreno glacier. Its visitors come from anywhere in the world, often months before the trip.

A site that only generates inquiries pushes all the selling work onto a person, and that puts a ceiling on how much can be sold that has nothing to do with demand.

The site worked as a brochure: it informed, and conversion happened afterward and by hand.

• Manual conversion: every inquiry required a reply, a quote based on passenger category and a close outside the site.
• Fares not exposed: discount categories and their documentation were not visible before contact.
• Language barrier: much of the audience does not speak Spanish, and without content in their language the inquiry never starts.

The cost was that of a seasonal business concentrating demand in a few months and serving it with capacity that cannot stretch.

We built the site with an online booking and payment engine, in three languages, with fares and conditions explicit before checkout.

And it was built ready to integrate, which is what later allowed the company's conversational agent to send passengers straight to complete their booking.

Booking engine

• Each cruise configured as a bookable product, with its departure times and operating calendar.
• Blocking of specific dates with no departure, so nothing gets sold that does not run.
• Optional ground transfer service attached to the tour that requires it.

Fares by category, before payment

• General fare, Argentine retirees, province residents, disability certificate holders, children and infants.
• Clear indication of the documentation each passenger must present to access a discount.
• Per passenger capture of name, document type and number, date of birth, nationality and contact.

Payment, states and autonomy

• Bank transfer and payment gateway integrated, with bookings in distinct states: pending, processing, completed and refunded.
• Automatic transactional email on each state change, including refunds.
• Portal operations manual so the team handles payments, cancellations and blocked dates without the vendor.

Architecture and technology

• WordPress with a tour and booking management system, in Spanish, English and Portuguese.
• Bank transfer and payment gateway integration, with periodic database and file backups.
• Platform prepared for external systems to generate booking links into it.

Learn more about ecommerce development.

Direct booking replaced the inquiry form as the site's primary conversion path.

Starting point

• Informational site, with the inquiry form as the only contact path.
• Quoting and closing every sale handled by a person.

Results

• 12,539 web bookings completed since the system went live.
• 39,851 sessions and 28,049 users, with 83,712 page views.
• 60.7% interaction rate.
• Visitors from 109 countries and 37 detected languages, with 40.1% of sessions in languages other than Spanish.

Strategic impact

• Selling capacity is no longer tied to the size of the team answering inquiries.
• The integration that later enabled booking from the conversational agent was in place from the start.