A booking-first website for a glacier and sea-kayak tour outfitter
Summit & Tide Outfitters
About the project
Summit & Tide Outfitters runs glacier hikes, sea-kayak trips, and multi-day fjord expeditions out of Seward. Their old site listed tours as static pages, so every booking still arrived by phone or email during office hours. We rebuilt the site around live availability, letting guests check open seats and pay a deposit in a few taps, while the guiding team kept its calendar in one place.
Technologies we used
What was holding them back
The trips sold themselves once a guest got on the phone, but the website was getting in the way before that conversation could happen.
- Bookings only by phone and email. Guests could read about a trip but not reserve it, so the team fielded the same availability questions all day and lost evening and overseas inquiries.
- No real-time availability. Seat counts lived in a spreadsheet, which meant double bookings on popular dates and manual back-and-forth to confirm every reservation.
- Slow and heavy on mobile. Large unoptimized photos pushed load times past eight seconds, and most travelers were browsing on phones from the dock or the road.
- Hard to update during the season. Adding a new departure or changing a price meant emailing a developer, so the calendar drifted out of date at the busiest time of year.
- Thin presence in search. Pages shared near-identical text and missing structured data, so the trips rarely surfaced for searches like sea kayak tour or glacier hike near Seward.
What success looked like
The goal was to remove the gap between a curious visitor and a confirmed, paid reservation, without adding work for a small seasonal team.
Objectives list
- Let guests check live availability and book any trip online.
- Collect deposits at the time of booking through a secure checkout.
- Sync seat counts automatically so the calendar can never oversell.
- Make every trip page fast and clear on a phone.
- Give the team a simple way to add departures and adjust prices.
- Surface trips for local and intent-driven searches.
- Present trip difficulty, gear, and timing so guests arrive prepared.
- Keep the brand voice rugged and welcoming across the whole site.
“We used to lose bookings every night the office was closed. Now travelers reserve and pay a deposit at midnight from another time zone, and our calendar is finally something we trust. The team handled the whole rebuild fast and made it easy to run ourselves.”
Live booking flow
We connected each trip to the FareHarbor availability feed, so the seats a guest sees are the seats that are actually open. Picking a date, choosing a party size, and paying a deposit through Stripe now happens in one uninterrupted flow. Confirmations and reminders go out automatically, which freed the team from chasing payments and rebuilding the calendar by hand.
Built for three kinds of visitor
- First-time travelers. clear difficulty ratings, what to bring, and what a day actually looks like, so newcomers feel confident booking the right trip.
- Returning adventurers. a saved trip history and a fast path back to favorite departures and multi-day expeditions.
- The guiding team. a single dashboard for departures, capacity, and pricing that anyone on staff can update in minutes.
Planning a booking-first website?
We turned Summit & Tide into a website that sells trips while the team is out on the water. Let us do the same for your business.
Discuss a projectReal, measurable outcomes
Within the first full season, the new site became the outfitter's primary sales channel. Online bookings replaced most of the phone traffic, deposits cleared instantly, and the calendar stayed accurate through peak weeks.
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