A Powerful Portal for Provincial Travel

The key goal of the redesign was to improve the end-user experience and better showcase the province’s wealth of tourism opportunities, providing useful tools to help visitors get the most out of their trip. Surfacing relevant, up-to-date information at the right time and making the site run faster to optimize the users’ research and access was also a major priority. 

In addition to providing public information via its portal, Tourism Québec oversees a network of 240 physical locations across the province where staff offer documentation and assistance to visitors, as they have access to more data than the general public. Tourism Quebec wanted the redesign to centralize that data within a restricted section of the site for use by their staff.
 

Since the global disruption set in motion by the pandemic, the BonjourQuébec.com digital platform has become even more vital for the province’s tourism providers. Restaurateurs, entertainment venues, tour operators and hospitality businesses need a strong, unified digital presence that enables them to connect with new audiences in innovative ways. 

The challenges involved in redesigning the Bonjour Québec website included:

• A highly complex information architecture comprising more than 30 distinct content types
• Content editors requiring a great deal of flexibility in data entry 
• The cutting-edge visual design of the site, created by partner agency LG2, introducing development complexities
• A large number of animations needed to be adjusted for improved accessibility
• The need to centralize data from multiple APIs and deliver it seamlessly throughout the platform
   

Evolving Web continues maintaining the site and its key features. In addition to leading the development work and migrating the original site from Drupal 7 to the latest version of Drupal, we performed extensive functional analysis for key features.

Our work included:

• Custom, fully searchable interactive map system integrating data from numerous API sources
• Full integration of rich, up-to-date data from various API sources, such as the province’s alliance of tourism establishments and different provider associations (e.g. golf courses, hotels, restaurants) 
• Powerful custom search engine using Elasticsearch with custom filters
• An interactive trip planner that offers powerful features to the public, including a drag-and-drop itinerary builder, custom calendars, and personalized maps created with Mapbox
• Permissions-based access that allows tourism operators to log in and access privileged information on the platform
• Chatbot implementation to assist visitors dynamically 
• Full multilingual capabilities, including a complex fallback system that ensures relevant results even when an exact translation is unavailable 
• Audience-based content prioritization to showcase different activities and establishments to different visitors according to relevant market data

The website shines a bright light on the diversity of Quebec’s tourism landscape and makes finding and discovering relevant, practical information easy and enjoyable for users. It has the ability to deliver contextually relevant content to visitors of all types, from residents looking for their next day trip to international travellers in search of adventure in the province. The platform allows users to interact with the content via features such as fully customizable mapping and a drag-and-drop itinerary planner. 

For Tourism Quebec and its partner associations, the ability to aggregate and serve data from such a large number of API sources ensures the accuracy and timeliness of all content. Content editors now have tools that allow them to publish a wide variety of content according to their needs without requiring technical assistance. Establishments gain better representation, and Tourism Quebec operators are able to better respond to visitor inquiries by accessing a centralized repository of reliable, up-to-date information.