A custom travel experience built for discovery, purchase, gifting, and life beyond the signal.
Local Detours helps travellers discover self-guided road trips across Nova Scotia, purchase the experience that fits them, and carry the route on their phone even when cellular service disappears. Tibbits Consulting designed and developed the platform as a custom WordPress Progressive Web App, bringing together editorial storytelling, ecommerce, protected content, maps, and offline access in one approachable experience.
The Challenge
The idea sounded simple: sell curated driving routes online. The real customer journey was more demanding. Travellers needed help choosing a route, a secure way to buy it, an account where they could find it again, and dependable access on rural roads where mobile service may be unreliable. The client also needed to manage routes, destinations, quiz logic, prices, maps, gifts, and customer access without relying on a developer for everyday updates.
One route also had to support two very different experiences. Before purchase, it functions as an attractive sales page that protects the itinerary’s most valuable details. After purchase, it becomes the traveller’s working guide. That shift had to happen automatically for signed-in customers without duplicating content or forcing the client to maintain separate pages.
Helping Travelers Find the Right Route
A custom recommendation quiz turns a potentially overwhelming catalogue into a guided conversation. Visitors choose a region and answer questions about interests, pace, scenery, food, and activities. A weighted scoring system compares those preferences with editable attributes on each route, while a firm region filter keeps the results geographically relevant. The strongest matches appear as the same familiar route cards used throughout the website, so moving from recommendation to exploration feels natural.
The scoring model is intentionally understandable. Staff can add questions and answers, choose only the attributes each answer should influence, and adjust route scores in a clear grid. The recommendation engine feels personal to a visitor, but it remains transparent and manageable behind the scenes.
A Purchase Flow That Unlocks the Experience
Public route pages provide enough detail to build interest without revealing the complete itinerary. Gravity Forms and Stripe handle checkout, coupon pricing, HST, and payment securely. After a successful payment, the platform creates or updates the customer account, grants permanent access to the purchased route, and sends one clear email with sign-in and route links. Access is never granted merely because a form was submitted; it follows confirmed payment.
The account experience was kept on-brand as well. Customers sign in, set or reset passwords, and return to their route library without being sent through the standard WordPress administration screens. Clearer password guidance and consolidated transactional emails reduce friction at the point where a first-time buyer is most likely to need reassurance.
The Trip Becomes a Mobile Guide
Once purchased, the same route page becomes a practical trip hub. Travellers receive planning notes, an itinerary teaser, destination-by-destination details, images, navigation links, and an interactive map. The structure is deliberately progressive: users can open each destination when they are ready rather than confronting the whole route at once.
The Progressive Web App adds the feature that matters most on the road. A traveller can save a route for offline use, including its protected content, images, fonts, and a generated static map. Saved routes also appear in an offline-capable route library. Online, the richer interactive map returns automatically; offline, the traveller still has the itinerary and essential geographic context.
Leaflet powers the interactive online map, while Stadia Maps supplies branded map tiles and generated static images. Numbered markers connect the map to the matching destination panels, and navigation buttons hand the final turn-by-turn journey to the mapping app already installed on the traveller’s device. This keeps the web experience useful without pretending to replace a dedicated navigation service.
Gifts Without Guessing the Perfect Route
Gift purchasing introduced a useful twist: the buyer does not have to choose the trip. They purchase a fixed-value Local Detours experience, select immediate or scheduled delivery, and add a personal message. The recipient receives a secure redemption link and chooses their own route. The system prevents early redemption for scheduled gifts, blocks reused links, and grants access to the recipient rather than the purchaser.
Built for the Business Behind the Adventure
Behind the customer experience is an editing system tailored to the way Local Detours works. The owner can build routes from structured WordPress fields, adjust quiz questions and scoring, manage customer access, generate maps, review gifts, and update global settings. The public design stays polished and consistent while the operational tools remain practical.
The implementation combines a custom WordPress plugin, Full Site Editing theme, Advanced Custom Fields, Gravity Forms, Stripe, Polylang-ready content relationships, custom database tables, REST endpoints, service-worker caching, and IndexedDB storage. Those parts are deliberately hidden behind familiar editing screens so the technical depth supports the business instead of becoming another job for the owner.
The Result
Local Detours launched as more than a tourism website. It is a complete digital product that helps customers choose confidently, pay securely, travel independently, and keep the information they need close at hand. For the client, it creates a flexible foundation for new routes, future French content, and continued growth without rebuilding the core experience.
Visit the live project at localdetours.ca