Boat Trips Club

Boat Trips Club is a yacht charter and boat tours business run by Laurens Mannaert, operating across destinations like Punta Cana, Cancun, and Los Cabos. I have been the embedded product designer and full-stack builder across a multi-year engagement that ran from performance triage to a full platform consolidation to the AI layer that now answers and quotes customers. This case study is about the biggest move: turning eleven separate location websites into one platform people actually book on.

The business had grown a website per destination: eleven of them, each with its own domain, its own visual identity, and its own half-maintained booking path. To a customer comparing trips, every location looked like a different company. To the business, it meant eleven funnels leaking in eleven different places, ad spend that could not be traced to bookings, and a team quoting charters by hand over email.

Framed as a business problem rather than a UX one: bookings were being lost between the sites, and nobody could say where.

Before touching the design I ran an analytics audit across all eleven sites to find where people actually dropped off, and pressure-tested the competitive field of yacht-charter and tour-booking software to see what a consolidated product needed to beat.

The data said the same thing from both directions: visitors who crossed from one location site to another rarely came back, and every extra step between landing and checkout cost real bookings. That drove the core decision: consolidate everything onto one domain, and restructure the whole IA around the fewest clicks to a booking.

One multi-location site, boattripsclub.com, replaced all eleven. Destinations became sections of one brand instead of separate businesses, sharing a single tour catalog, review wall, and callback flow.

The booking flow was redesigned around that fewest-clicks principle, then put in front of a closed user group in Maze before launch. The first rounds failed in instructive ways: testers hesitated at the tour-selection step and could not tell private from shared trips at a glance. The flow was restructured around those findings and retested until task completion held above ninety percent.

Members got a reason to stay on the domain: a dashboard with trips and bookings, Sailor points and tiers, a referral program, and PDF confirmations. Payments went through a custom Stripe integration, so checkout finally lived on the platform instead of over email.

Being the person who also ships the code meant the design decisions survived contact with production.

• WordPress performance work end to end: caching, asset optimization, and Core Web Vitals brought back to green after a month of chronic CPU strain
• Migration cleanup at consolidation: 350+ broken internal links repaired and redirect chains flattened, so eleven sites' worth of SEO equity landed on one domain
• Zoho CRM automation in Deluge, cutting the manual steps between an enquiry and a confirmed booking
• GA4 and Meta Pixel attribution wired to real booking revenue from Bokun and Zoho, so marketing spend became measurable for the first time

With the platform consolidated, the next bottleneck was human: every charter quote was composed by hand. FirstMate, an AI charter-quote agent, now reads an enquiry, matches it against the fleet and availability, and drafts the quote for the team to approve, turning a same-day task into a minutes-long one.

Two more agents cover the front of house: Mariana greets visitors on the site and routes them to the right trip, and Anderson handles the follow-up side, so no enquiry goes quiet.

• 11 location sites consolidated into one domain and one brand
• Booking task completion above 90% in the final Maze round, up from the low sixties in round one
• A double-digit lift in visitors reaching checkout after the funnel rebuild
• Charter quotes that took a working day now go out in minutes through FirstMate
• Marketing spend measurable end to end, tied to real booking revenue

WordPress, Stripe, Zoho CRM, Deluge, Maze, GA4, Meta Pixel, Bokun