Rainbow Tours: Optional Excursions as a Standalone Digital Product

Rainbow Tours S.A. is one of the leading tour operators in Poland. Its website is visited by around 1.5 million people per month, and customers can, among other things, book optional excursions in 28 countries. We set out to change how these excursions are perceived and sold: to make them more appealing, easier to access, and attractive to a much broader group of travelers.

Our collaboration covered :

Functional and visual benchmarking. Assessment of the current offer against market standards and a full UX audit.

Strategy and concept development. We organized a one-day workshop at the client’s office. We combined research insights with a creative session and redefined optional excursions, both from the business and design perspectives, with particular emphasis on how to communicate them to customers.

Product design. For four intensive weeks, we worked on the desktop and mobile versions: information architecture, mockups (wireframes), user flows, interface design, a UI kit, and a prototype.

Usability testing. We conducted remote tests using the RITE method. After each round, we refined the design based on user feedback.

The goal went beyond a simple product update. We wanted to rethink how optional excursions are perceived and experienced, and to invite new user groups to discover the world with Rainbow Tours.

The challenge

Until now, optional excursions had been sold exclusively as an add-on to a holiday package. Our aim was to turn them into a standalone product and make Rainbow Tours one of the first tour operators in Poland to take this step.

This required changing an entrenched customer mindset. Additionally, the new site had to visually reference the main Rainbow Tours service while having a clear enough identity of its own so that users wouldn’t confuse the two.

Our design process

Our collaboration began in January 2023 with an in-depth UX audit of the current solution, as well as functional and visual benchmarking. We then held a one-day co-creation session at the Rainbow Tours office, during which we discussed the research findings and outlined the future of optional excursions from both a commercial and user experience perspective.

Over the next four weeks, we went through the product design phase for desktop and mobile devices : information architecture, creating wireframes and flows, user interface (UI) design, and prototyping.

To keep the design process on track, we presented the prototype to users with highly diverse profiles. By observing their thinking and how they interacted with the product, we were able to refine the design step by step, keeping in mind the ambitious goal we had set.

Outcome

In collaboration with the Rainbow Tours team, we developed a user-centered design strategy that aligns the company’s interests with real user needs. It breathed new life into the underlying logic of optional excursions and made them far more appealing. New features allow customers to book excursions independently. This is a real breakthrough for the Polish travel market: a better user experience, access to new customer segments, and greater market reach.

Customers can now search for specific attractions or destinations and choose their preferred pickup location. In addition, we evolved the platform based on in-depth analysis of market trends, changing user needs, and best practices in the travel industry, introducing interest-based categorization: sports, gastronomy, and more. This categorization, combined with insights from user testing, led to the introduction of dual naming for greater clarity: “optional excursions” are also presented as “attractions.” This decision proved crucial to creating a robust, standalone product aligned with how users really think.

Summary

This project has transformed both how optional tours are perceived and how easy they are to use. A user-centered design and iterative testing did far more than just improve functionality: they turned the offering into a standalone product, opening up significant new sales opportunities. Our collaboration with Rainbow Tours shows what matters most to us: digital products that people enjoy using and that also support the business.