KP Nine - Private tour to see Aurora Borealis Helping a professor earning money through a solo side-gig he loves so much -- When Mats jumped into our online call, being in what is obviously a classroom, I asked him point blank: “Are you a teacher or something?”, He bursted out laughing whilst nodding. He is a university Lecturer, he divulged. “I thought this call was to discuss building a website for a private tour business?”, I asked with bemusement. 

To my surprise, Mats has a private tour business on the side, guiding people to see Aurora with their own eyes. “I just love Aurora so much, that I want to spend my daytime to teach about it and my nighttime to take people to see it”. 

Back then he used to only open for 4-6 private tours within 6 months period (Sep - Mar) each year and it was fine. Now he wants to take it more seriously and serve more tours but he is starting to feel the strain of being a one-man operation. 

“I don’t want to hire more people just yet, so my thinking is to make my operation more manageable for one person. I want to keep doing my day job, so obviously I cannot take phone calls during the day for most of the time, nor do I have the bandwidth to have the back-and-forth with customers via email, which most of the time end up with no booking. Aurora borealis is only visible from September to late March, so it’s a very limited time to do business with, so every tour counts. That is why Cancelation and no-shows really hurt the business”

 From this FICTIONAL call with Mats, I concluded that I want to “fix” his appointment-based business by:

Fixing the front door: availability check and request schedule is self-serve for the possible customers, this would help both customers with strong intent and the ones just browsing around for now without needing to burden Mats. The self-checkout to pay for the deposit for confirming booking is also automatically generated.

Fixing the follow-through: requiring deposit payment is also a way to reduce no-shows by filtering in serious customers only. Self-serve booking tracking page is available for the customers to take actions on their booking: reschedule, canceling, requesting update, and seeing the updates on the likelihood of their trip being still on. 

Each of these updates: booking rescheduling, booking cancelation, trip being postponed due to weather, ALL of these that normally require back-and-forth between the customers and Mats, will now have been automated by the system and both parties are always kept in the loop.

Try it yourself: https://see-aurora-booking.lovable.app/