Bahamas Transfers Project

The business assumed that groups of tourists were invited to join a tour. Usually, such a group would come from a certain company or organization. The organization needed personal invitations to be sent to the invited people allowing them to book transfers and get access to special services and activities.

An invitation would give tourists the possibility to sign in to a closed area online and get access to the following options:

• Transportation requests - for arrivals, departures, and round trips
• Activity requests such as catamarans, powerboats, site tours, etc.
• Online payments for transportations and activities
• Online receipts and helpful notifications
• Information about their hotels and tours
• Leave feedback: a review and a 1 to 5 star-rating.

The special challenge was a non-typical payment gateway Plug’n Pay which was required because of an easy way to integrate with the banking system in The Bahamas and charge clients without additional fees and commissions.

There was another part of the flow - the admin part. It allowed the admin to:

• Set up settings in several hotels and prepare for upcoming events
• Edit types of transportations and cars
• Manage groups of tourists, enable and disable available options in each group
• See and manage transportation requests
• Create, enable, and disable activities
• See activity requests
• See the payments
• Download invoices
• Resend confirmations
• Filter all data by group, date, type of data
• Export anything into a CSV file.

And do other useful stuff an admin or accounts manager might need.

Overall, the system had to be a flexible tool for managers and accountants and also an easy-to-use portal for privileged groups of tourists.

Since 2017, we have been working on the platform in stages. With each stage, Bahamas Transfers was growing and receiving new features.

The technologies chosen for the application were:

• Ruby on Rails
• PostgreSQL relational database
• Plug’n Pay payment gateway
• ActiveMerchant
• ODF Report and Wicked PDF for downloadable reports
• Sidekiq for background processing
• Sidekiq Scheduler extension for periodic jobs
• SASS / jQuery / Bootstrap for front-end

These technologies were commonly used for rapid prototyping, which allowed the developers to focus on the business goals.

We also integrated the customer portal in the existing CMS-based presentation website which was set up in Wordpress. The integration was seamless so that a customer could not feel any difference when switching from the Wordpress part to the custom portal.

After several iterations, the development team implemented the original requirements, launched the platform, watched how it worked for accounts administrators handling various groups of tourists, and got to the point where the established flow only had to be polished and improved.

Since the launch in 2017, the Bahamas Transfers project has been a solid back office solution for a company that serves groups of tourists and hosts events.

The extended requirements that we get from time to time are mostly related to:

• Adding new options to the customer’s area
• Allowing the admin to view certain reports and have control over certain actions
• Enabling more flexible payment options (prepayments, deposits, retainers, etc).

Nowadays, we are looking to expand our collaboration with the customer and develop additional back and front-office tools for serving events and renting out products for activities.