The Cottages to Castles website presents European visitors with a listing of villas available for weekly rental in Italy and Croatia. The website offers browsing using a map-based interface, simple searching by region and province, or advanced searching including all available amenities. Customers can then book using the villas' availability calendars, which are synchronised with a third-party booking system using XML.

The website also includes a comprehensive administration facility enabling maintenance of all pertinent information.

Initial Situation

Client asked N-VisionIT Interactive to take over the maintenance and on-going enhancement of the site.

Interactive Solutions

We redesigned the site to be more appealing to a modern audience. We enhanced the homepage with a Flash-based database-driven map and region browsing function. We also added a compare function so that customers could select a number of villas, view them in side-by-side format and compare their pricing, and amenities.

A scheduled export routine allows Cottages-to-Castles to offer their villa information to third-party partners as an additional source of revenue.

We also enhanced the administration side in a number of ways to facilitate easier administration of frequently changing information.

Results

Clients were very pleased with updated appearance and functionality. As a result, N-VisionIT Interactive was asked to design the American version of the site - Italy My Dream.