Optional Excursions Reinvented: Rainbow Tours' Product Shift

Rainbow Tours S.A. is a leading tour operator in Poland, drawing around 1.5 million monthly visits to its website, where customers can book optional excursions to 28 countries, among other things. Our collaboration set out to reshape how these excursions, known in Polish as “wycieczki fakultatywne”, are understood and sold: more appealing, more accessible, and open to a much broader range of travelers.

Our work at SH covered:

Functional and visual benchmarking. Evaluating the existing offering against market standards and running a comprehensive UX audit.

Strategy and concept development. A full-day, co-creative onsite workshop that merged insights from the research phase with a creative session, redefining optional excursions in both business and design terms, with a focus on how to communicate them to clients.

Product design. A four-week intensive phase for desktop and mobile: information architecture, wireframing and flows, user interface design, UI kit creation, and prototyping.

User testing. Online RITE tests, with the design refined based on user feedback at every round.

The objective went beyond refreshing a product. We wanted to reimagine how optional excursions are perceived and experienced, and invite new user groups to explore the world with Rainbow Tours.

The Challenge

Optional excursions had traditionally been sold only as an add-on to a main vacation package. Our aim was to turn them into a standalone product, positioning Rainbow Tours among the first tour operators in Poland to do so.

That required a significant shift in the existing customer mental model. On top of that, the new site had to align visually with Rainbow Tours' main site while staying distinct enough to avoid confusion.

The Journey

Our collaboration began in January 2023, starting with a thorough UX audit of the current solution alongside functional and visual benchmarking. Next came a full-day co-creation workshop at Rainbow Tours' premises, where we discussed the research findings and mapped out the future of optional excursions from both business and user experience perspectives.

Over the following four weeks, we ran the product design phase for desktop and mobile: information architecture, wireframing and flows, user interface design, and prototyping.

To keep the design direction on point, we put a prototype in front of users from very different backgrounds. Watching how they think and how they interact with the product let us refine the design step by step, toward the ambitious goal we had set for optional excursions.

The Outcome

Working with the Rainbow Tours team, we built the strategy on user-centered design, balancing the business's interests with what people actually need. This revitalized the logic behind optional excursions and made them considerably more appealing. New features let customers purchase excursions independently, a genuine shift for the Polish travel market: better customer experience, plus access to new customer segments and a broader market reach.

Customers can now search for specific attractions or destinations and choose their preferred pick-up location. We also enhanced the platform based on in-depth market trend analysis, changing user demands, and leading practices from the travel industry, introducing categorization by interest: sports, food, and more. That categorization, combined with insights from user tests, led us to implement dual naming for clarity: 'optional excursions' are also presented as 'attractions'. This decision proved key to turning them into a robust standalone product that matches how users actually think.

Conclusion

This project changed both the perception and the usability of optional excursions. User-centered design and iterative testing did more than improve functionality: they moved the offering from a simple add-on to a standalone product, opening substantial new sales opportunities. The collaboration with Rainbow Tours shows what we care about most: digital products that people enjoy using and that move the business forward at the same time.

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