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Lapland Hotels & Safaris x Vincit

From Lapland dream to “Booking confirmed”

Summary

Lapland Safaris competes against large international operators in the Finnish Lapland tourism market. To secure its market position and accelerate growth, the company carried out a massive digital renewal. The single, overarching idea that tied our strategy, design, and solution together was to transform a highly complex logistical transaction into a seamless, inspiring, and stress-free experience, designed to make international travelers' Lapland dreams come true.

Key results include 9% year-over-year growth in online reservations despite intensified competition, alongside an emphasis on increasing average purchase value by 6% and growing the share of mobile users by 31%.

https://www.laplandsafaris.com/fi

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Turning market challenges into competitive opportunity

The Lapland tourism market faces growing competition from global Online Travel Agencies (OTAs), coinciding with a major shift toward last-minute bookings. This trend is fueled by technological convenience, budget flexibility, and a desire for spontaneity.

Lapland Safaris outdated online service did not offer competitive advantage in the changed environment. The service did not support multi-activity bookings in a single cart, managing multiple language versions took too many resources, and the customer experience did not stand out. The platform's renewal was carefully designed to immerse travelers in the serene Lapland scenery, creating a peaceful and inspiring booking experience. 
 
Key business drivers:
 
  1. Boost upselling: Maximizing revenue by supporting multi-activity purchases in single cart
  2. Market share growth: Capturing market share from competitors and bringing OTA customers back to Lapland Safaris’ own channel
  3. Conversion and modernization: Improving conversion rates, modernizing the outdated user experience, and making it mobile-optimized. 
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quote
Laplandsafaris.com is not a standalone initiative, but a core component of Lapland Hotels & Safaris digital transformation journey. It has created new opportunities to develop our business in a data-driven way, respond to increasing competition, and continuously build more seamless and compelling digital experiences for our customers.

Anita Korsoff, Ecommerce Development Manager / Lapland Hotels & Safaris

Lapland Safari’s seamless journey: From Lapland dream to “Booking confirmed”
The international traveler doesn't just buy a safari; they buy the dream of Lapland. Planning and booking a last-minute, multi-activity vacation can be, however, rather stressful. As the local expert, Lapland Safaris designed its digital service to operate in two synchronized modes: The Dreaming Mode, which uses Lapland’s visual advantage to guide the customer through their early journey, and The Intuitive Purchasing Mode, which simplifies complex backend logistics (managing over 300 local providers, availability, and seasonality) into a single, reliable path.

UX/UI design process

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Design work started with defining priority use cases and designing initial layouts utilising Design system compontents. A prototype was created with real content and designs were finalised based on customer validation findings.

The local Lapland dream planner
We positioned the new service as "Local Lapland dream planner." The decision to emphasize the dreaming phases (awareness, discovery) was based on customer insights into how long and important these phases are. Lapland Safaris needs to offer not only the easiest booking experience, but also the best support for the dreaming phase for customers to return when they are ready to book.
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The solution
The intuitive user experience was achieved through focusing on mobile optimised UX/UI design, cutting-edge web architecture, and deep systems integration. The core feature driving the business impact was the Persistent Experience Cart and Itinerary Planner, fundamentally shifting the user experience from single-item booking to multi-activity, multi-day trip planning. This solved a critical previous challenge where customers could not purchase multiple services in a single cart. As a part of the renewal, a new CMS was implemented, and the use of machine translations in content production was enabled to accelerate the content management of five different language versions to serve an international audience.
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Design and experience
Our design strategy focused on going above the industry standards and making Lapland Safaris online service the best service for international customers to make their Lapland dreams come true. 
 
Going above industry standard
Thorough benchmarking and industry insights were utilised as tools to design a customer experience that would create a positive, differentiating factor and competitive advantage.
 
Validating choices
Purchasing journey phases and the redesigned mobile and desktop UI were validated with customers to ensure the designs were ready for development. For example, the amount of informative content on the activity “product” page was increased based on validation findings.
 
New brand visuals
The project included the implementation of the brand's renewed visual style across its digital presence.
 
Design system 
The shared Design System that we built ensured the new service's cohesiveness with the existing Lapland Hotels online service.
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Expertise used

Service design
UX & UI design
Next.js
Storyblok
.NET
Azure
Vercel
Technology and integrations
The technical solution is a robust, modern, and lean architecture designed to balance performance, scalability, and data accuracy across all stages of the high-season customer journey. The technical development was executed with tight, flexible cooperation, allowing the core development phase to move rapidly toward the MVP launch.
 
  • Architecture for performance: To handle peak seasonal traffic and maintain speed, the system utilizes a hybrid approach combining Static Site Generation (SSG) with Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR), Server-Side Rendering (SSR), and client-side rendering. This allowed the system to serve static, fast content during peak loads while ensuring real-time data where it mattered most.
  • Complex ERP integration: The central technical challenge was the core integration with the Lapland Safaris’ ERP system. New e-commerce APIs were defined and implemented to manage the inherent complexity of the safari business:
    • Physical asset management: The system was engineered to handle complex resource dependencies in real-time. For example, if the last free snowmobile in Levi is booked, the system must immediately show all safaris relying on a snowmobile as sold out.
    • Real-time data balancing: To maintain performance, prices and availability are served from a cache in the early stages of the customer journey, but as the customer progresses deeper into the booking funnel, the system shifts to using live, real-time data to guarantee accuracy and prevent erroneous bookings.
  • Content and SEO excellence: Content management was previously challenging. Storyblok was selected as the new CMS to allow visual content management and support maintenance of multiple language versions. The implementation achieved an excellent technical SEO score of 100%. An innovative highlight was the use of machine translation in content production, significantly accelerating the creation and maintenance of five different language versions for the international audience.
We also developed an intelligent dynamic pricing engine for the online store to balance demand fluctuations and maximize capacity utilization. The solution automatically adjusts prices based on real-time demand – encouraging early bookings for popular tours while enabling attractive last-minute pricing for departures with remaining capacity. This data-driven approach improves profitability, reduces unused capacity, and creates a scalable competitive advantage in experience-based commerce.
quote
I love the visuals; they create a sense of peace. That's what I sort of expect when I'm heading up North – I want calm and a closeness to nature.

A quote from a target group representative during the customer validation process

The results

9%
Increase in online sales YoY
+6%
Average order value YoY
From 59% to 46%
Shopping cart abandonment decreased YoY
31%
Increase in mobile users YoY
The Safaris team
Client
Lapland Hotels & Safaris
 
Design & Tech
Vincit
 
Dynamic pricing
Aitomation
 
The team
Anita Korsoff
Heidi Suuripää
Tiina Taskula
Jonna Pikkusaari
Jari Huilla
Johannes Havukallio
Eveliina Salomaa
Heini Kauppinen
Thiago Chaves de Oliveira Horta
Atte Tuomisto
Heikki Jetsonen
Daniel Mäkinen
Joonas Hiltunen
Oskari Ilkka
Pauliina Veijalainen
Ines Ahlroth
 

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