Discover France: Guided Bicycle Tours

Step 2 of the Discover France booking form, Participant Information: a menu for the number of participants, then fields for each one (name, birthdate, gender, dietary needs, room and bed preference), followed by questions about equipment, pedals and fitness. — Step 2 of the booking form in October 2011, from the Wayback Machine.

Discover France (archive) ran guided and self-guided bicycle tours, and multisport tours in France. I came in during a 2008 website upgrade and supported the business until it changed hands in 2017. During this time, it became authorized to run VIP Tour de France tours, able to let its riders onto the closed racecourse just before the pros arrived. I handled the technical side of its website and several sister sites.

Effect Media designed the sites. I worked closely with them, and regularly with the business owner, the hosting provider, and other third parties.

What I Did

A new booking form. I rebuilt the 3-step tour booking form (archive), including variations for specific questions needed by the sister sites. The questions changed with the way the form was reached, from pedal type to diet, where the choices could be combined, down to vegan but eats fish.
Payments. The sites took credit card payments for tours.
End-of-trip surveys. Customers were sent a survey when their trip ended.
Third-party services. The sites connected to services such as a CRM from Peak 15 Systems.
PCI compliance. I made Discover France and its sister sites PCI compliant and kept them that way. That included working with the server’s owner to upgrade configurations and system packages without breaking anything for the other clients sharing the server. He later came back to me for similar work on other sites he hosted.
Content updates. General updates to the sites’ content.

All of the sites ran on PHP and jQuery.

The Sale

The business was sold in 2016. I worked with the old and new owners, on different continents, to move everything across with no downtime: email on Google Apps, the website, and ownership of the domains. The hand-over finished in Jan 2017, and with it my time with Discover France.