TaaS for a Successful Tourism Platform: Experience Antwerp and Hybrid

Background

Experience Antwerp is the official partner of the City of Antwerp for tickets and tips. In close collaboration with the City of Antwerp and local providers, they guide day-trippers and weekend tourists through everything the city has to offer. Additionally, Experience Antwerp acts as a helping hand for the Antwerp tourism sector, putting the city further on the map as a unique tourist destination.

When Experience Antwerp was tasked in 2020 with launching an online tourism platform for the city, they engaged Hybrid for support in strategy, branding, development, and marketing.

The Challenge

Launch of an online booking platform for Antwerp.
The Experience Antwerp team wanted to launch an online booking platform in a short time, connected with Gantner’s booking system to sell individual and group tickets to private customers, schools, and companies. We were therefore involved in different tracks of this project.

Branding
They were looking for a partner to first develop their brand strategy and branding (who we are, who is our target audience, and how we communicate our message). We conducted a branding workshop and subsequently developed designs as prototypes for the platform and newsletter.

Technical / functional development and advice
We were already on board for the frontend development of the new platform. They also needed extra expertise for technical analysis to choose the most suitable platform in terms of technology.

Would they go for a static website, a WooCommerce, or a custom application? What impact does each of these choices have on their budget, desired functionalities, and deadlines? How does this choice relate to their future plans?

In consultation with Experience Antwerp and Gantner, their partner for the booking system, it was decided to build the website with WooCommerce. Gantner already had the development for the related plugins on the roadmap, and via WordPress we could realize the planned information architecture and SEO optimizations.

Performance marketing
It was also important that digital performance marketing, especially SEO, was ready from launch, so that the website would immediately have a good start given the competition.

We conducted keyword research in four languages, developed the ideal information architecture, and contributed to the SEO copy. After go-live, our team continued to build campaigns, corresponding landing pages, and further optimize the website based on results.

The challenges

• Aligning different tracks and parties
• Considering various stakeholders: prospects, Flemish government, City of Antwerp, Experience Antwerp partners such as tour guides and museums
• Competing with existing platforms via online marketing
• Building brand / branding and positioning from scratch, while considering partner requirements
• Responding to changing search volumes (ads and SEO)
• Technical choice (proposed by Gantner) where we handled the Frontend
• Tight deadline to go live by end of November 2020

Why Hybrid Agency?

Together with Experience Antwerp, it was decided not to invoice on a project basis but to enter into a long-term engagement via the digital partnership.

This gave them extra flexibility, so that depending on the required expertise and priorities, the hours could be recorded or shifted accordingly.

At the start of the project, the hours were mainly for project management and technical analyses, while towards the end, hours were primarily for development and online marketing.

The Collaboration

The project with Experience Antwerp started in May 2020 with a kick-off in which the Zanzibar team explained their ambitions and plans. They had won the assignment from the city of Antwerp to develop a new platform for Antwerp city tourism, focused on guides and walking tours. Our initial scope included the frontend development of the booking platform and the use of online marketing expertise during and after the platform’s go-live. It soon became clear that more work was required than just frontend development and marketing.

To strengthen the collaboration, an additional technical team was assembled on top of Experience Antwerp’s commercial team. This team provided the necessary expertise in web development. Additionally, we worked closely with Gantner, the ticket platform chosen by Experience Antwerp, including their developers and project manager.

An important decision concerned the platform: would we choose Gantner’s lean widgets, a CMS such as WordPress, or a fully custom platform? After detailed training and analysis of Gantner’s “Enviso” platform, WooCommerce plugins, and API options, it became clear that the WooCommerce plugins offered the best balance between functionality, budget, and timing. This allowed us to quickly build a fully-fledged website with all must-haves and some nice-to-haves.

The collaboration was intensively coordinated via weekly meetings, extra workshops where needed, and tools such as Asana and ClickUp for backlog management and Google Drive for content exchange. Furthermore, a RACI matrix was established to clearly define responsibilities and ensure the right team acted at the right time.

Timeline
The project approach began with a preliminary study and analysis: the backlog was drawn up with epics and user stories, in which priorities were set between must-haves and nice-to-haves. Page sketches served as tangible prototypes for the MVP and provided insight into future functionalities. In parallel, our marketing team mapped out the ideal architecture, including keyword analysis and performance audit for four languages, to integrate SEO optimization from the beginning.

Next, we organized workshops around brand strategy, involving external parties to develop a brand book, logo, fonts, and leading visuals with the Experience Antwerp team. This formed the basis for the web design and overall look & feel of the communication. Based on mockups and design prototypes, the final user flows were developed, allowing the design team to start the final design.

The frontend development of the WordPress theme followed, including configuration of architecture, slugs, URLs, SEO optimizations, categories, permissions, multilingualism, and content entry. Plugins were used to retrieve live data from Gantner, fields and content types were extended, and custom solutions such as automatic translations via WPML, forwarding contact forms to the CRM, and extended search functionality were integrated.

Finally, end validation and testing took place in Gantner’s test environment. Our team implemented adjustments, validated plugin developments, and ensured all changes were correctly deployed to production. This resulted in a stable, fully tested, and functional platform.

Results and impact

In November 2020, the teaser page with newsletter subscription was launched to attract the first interested users.

During the same period, our team continued working on the full WooCommerce website. New ideas and requirements were added to the backlog, analyzed, prioritized, and, if necessary, included in the roadmap and the next sprint.

Simultaneously, the Experience Antwerp team worked closely with our marketing team to write all necessary SEO content, onboard the required partners, and validate website features when needed.

In February 2021, the soft launch of the first MVP took place! A well-deserved reward for the hard work of the previous months. The period of February–March also marked the start of the pandemic, so communication around the platform was limited until the summer.

The future

Two years later, we can state that, despite the pandemic, Experience Antwerp is well on its way to positioning itself in the market. This year, they reached an average of 150k–200k visitors per month.

Since the go-live in February 2021, there has been a month-on-month increase in organic keyword rankings, with the average position improving from 56 to 25.

To this day, we continue to collaborate with the Experience Antwerp team for both development and online marketing via an ongoing partnership, where each month new priorities are discussed and planned to achieve optimal results.

Conclusion

The launch of Experience Antwerp was an intensive process in which strategy, branding, development, and marketing went hand in hand. Despite a complex context and the limitations of a pandemic, we succeeded in creating a performant platform that today attracts 150,000 to 200,000 visitors per month. Organic visibility continues to grow, with an average ranking improvement from position 56 to 25. Thanks to the flexible partnership model between Experience Antwerp and Hybrid, further development and optimization continue at full speed.