YHA WEBSITE OFFERS NEW BOOKING FUNCTIONALITY

The Youth Hostel Association New Zealand, YHA, have just launched their new website with innovative travel package functionality.

The site shines with a fresh and clear design, making it easier for the user to find what they’re looking for. The new availability screen allows users to flick between availabilities, rates and membership - and family discounts get displayed on the fly.

YHA have reached their goal of providing a next generation booking tool for YHA guests.
The user can now plan their trip entirely online in just one visit. Booking accommodation and travel packages, and checking and updating the membership has never been easier with yha.co.nz.

Along with the new website comes the YHA mobile site that offers a quick and easy booking process. This customised view designed specially for smart-phone access does come in handy for anyone travelling and needing an affordable place to stay.

The website was built and designed by SilverStripe Ltd on the SilverStripe CMS, in collaboration with third-party organisations. The integration of several different solutions into the Content Management System, and having them all work together, was the biggest challenge.

The booking engine SilverStripe created is based on GuestCentrix, a point of sale solution provided by CMS Hospitality (AUS), which holds hostel availability information for all YHA NZ hostels. Other elements working with the CMS are the payment solution, the membership systems and a significant amount of business rules around hostel policies.

“The project has been complex, with high standards of innovation and work quality expected from all of our vendors”, says Daniel Shields, Marketing Director at YHA. “SilverStripe quickly understood the business drivers and worked to bring genuine improvements to travellers looking for a simple, secure and guaranteed accommodation booking”.

About SilverStripe:
SilverStripe CMS is an open source web content management system used by government organisations, businesses and non-profit organisations around the world. The CMS is an easy to customise power tool for professional web developers and easy to use for web content authors. With over 420,000 downloads and more than 5,500 active members in the online community the CMS is widely known and supported.

The CMS is written in PHP and can be used within a Linux, Windows or Apple environment. SilverStripe was the first Open Source CMS to be certified by Microsoft, in May 2010.

Tim Copeland, Sam Minnée and Sigurd Magnusson founded SilverStripe Ltd in 2000 in Wellington, New Zealand. In 2006 SilverStripe decided to release the CMS under the open source BSD license. The decision to do so was based on the idea that open source simply produces better software through the support and input of the community.

Code, content and design are separated from each other within the CMS, which makes teamwork more productive. Along with the CMS, clients can also use the site monitoring tool Dawn, which was developed by SilverStripe Ltd, in order to monitor site performance. This is especially important for companies in which website downtime would result in major revenue loss.

SilverStripe Ltd offers highly customised web solutions based on the SilverStripe CMS and framework, with customers including local clients like Air New Zealand, AA, Metlink and a number of regional, district and city councils. SilverStripe has also gained traction overseas and was the platform of choice to run the US Democratic National Convention website that supported Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Today, SilverStripe has about 40 staff in its Wellington, Auckland and Melbourne offices, as well as partners throughout the world.

SilverStripe Ltd.
Kerstin Schuman | Product Marketing Manager
PO Box 11-804
Wellington, New Zealand
Phone: +64 4 978 7330 xtn 56
Email: kerstin@silverstripe.com
Skype: kerstin.silvertripe

This release was published on openPR.