The Client
Youth Hostel Association (YHA) is a charity that transforms young lives forever through travel and real adventure. YHA aims to motivate young people to discover and grow in the great outdoors by offering unique trips and affordable accommodation throughout England and Wales.
The Situation
YHA are pushing the boundaries in their sector, transforming people's perceptions of what staying in hostel means. Next year, they aim to launch a host of digitized experiences driven by their new decoupled architecture, including in-hostel kiosks, digital check-in, and keyless door entry. With that goal in mind, YHA wanted to build a Drupal 8 site on Acquia Cloud Enterprise that would enable a single hub of content to manage multiple user interfaces, utilizing different front-end technologies to provide a variety of customer-facing digital solutions in-hostel and online. The overall goal? To connect the digital user journey, from the inspiration phase to booking, paying, check-in, room-entry, food ordering, nearby attractions, to check-out and feedback/review.
The Challenge
While YHA had a clear vision for its future, its disjointed network of websites stifled its ability to curate a truly intuitive user experience. YHA’s customers—especially those on mobile devices—struggled with multiple websites, as did YHA’s editors. To better support the needs of its users, YHA asked Microserve to lead a migration from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8, in a mere four months for the first phase.
The Solution
Microserve built the YHA.org.uk website—the primary source of income for YHA—on Drupal 8 Commerce. The teams completed the project using a fully agile approach, working together with regular sprint planning to ensure deliverables were met during the process.
The Results
Metrics show that site changes have improved the user experience. Average booking funnel time for logged in users has decreased by 40 percent. Mobile traffic has increased by 30 percent and the site bounce rate has decreased by 26 percent. And donations are up as well; donations at the checkout have increased by 110 percent.