Thompson River RV Resort · Hospitality

A booking-first site for a river resort

A 112-site resort outside Kamloops was taking reservations by phone, from an office nobody was sitting in. We rebuilt the site around the booking.

Role: Brand refresh, UX, design, build
Year: 2025
Deliverables: Identity mark, responsive site, booking flow, interactive site map, photography direction

The Thompson River RV Resort homepage shown on a laptop and a phone, with a full-bleed river valley photograph and a single booking button. — The homepage carries one image, one line, one button. The phone layout was drawn first.

The problem

Thompson River RV Resort sits where the river bends out of the canyon, an hour east of Kamloops. The Vance family has run it for three generations — 112 sites, forty of them on the water, and a reputation built entirely by word of mouth.

The site was a single page built on a template in 2014. Rates were a JPEG. The contact form forwarded to an address nobody had opened in two years. Four out of five visitors arrived on a phone, where the rate sheet was unreadable and the phone number would not dial.

The cost showed up in the booking log. Guests called from the road, reached voicemail because the office was out on a site, and booked the next resort down the highway. The office spent its mornings answering the same six questions — amperage, rig length, Wi-Fi, dogs, distance to Sun Peaks, and whether anything was open on the water in July.

The approach

Four moves, in order.

Turn the phone log into the sitemap

We sat in the office for a week and wrote down every question that came in. The six that repeated became the six things a traveller can answer in under thirty seconds, on one bar of signal.

One promise above the fold

A circular river-bend monogram replaced a stretched clip-art logo. The homepage was cut to a single line and a single button, held within thumb reach at every width.

Let people pick the site they drove for

Riverfront pads are the reason guests detour. We put them on an illustrated map, filterable by hookup, pull-through, riverfront and tent, with live availability instead of a rate table.

Book on the existing system

The flow asks only what determines availability — dates, rig length, guests, site type. It writes to the reservation software the front desk already uses through an API layer, so nothing was migrated.

The work

What we built.

The new homepage

The new Thompson River homepage on desktop and mobile: a deep green duotone river valley with a headline reading Park at the water's edge and a floating booking card. — The booking widget moved onto the homepage itself. Dates and party size are answerable before a guest has scrolled once.

The amenities page: a river photograph banner, three amenity cards with line icons, and a list of what arrives at a serviced pad. — Amenities, written from the phone log. Hookups, laundry, Wi-Fi, fire pits and pet policy each get a plain answer — no PDF, no call.

The sites and map page: filter pills above an illustrated property map with numbered pads along the river, and a detail card for a selected site. — The property map. Tapping a pad shows its photograph, dimensions and features; availability colours the map as it changes.

The booking page: date, rig length and guest fields, a site-type selector, a live price breakdown and an availability calendar. — Four taps to a reservation. Rig length is a field rather than an afterthought, which ended the mismatched bookings the office used to unpick by phone. Tax and fees are in the total at the top.

Also delivered

A two-day photography shoot covering every loop in shoulder and peak season. Structured lodging data and a rebuilt Google Business Profile. An automated pre-arrival email carrying directions, gate code and check-in window, 48 hours out. Two CMS sessions so the office can change rates and close loops without calling us.

Guests reach this site from the highway on a weak signal, so the homepage carries under 400 KB on first load and the booking flow works without JavaScript. Contrast and tap targets meet WCAG 2.1 AA — the audience skews older and reads in daylight.

Results

First full season, against the same months the year before.

+63%

Online reservations

−41%

Inbound booking calls

3.4×

Mobile conversion rate

91%

Riverfront occupancy, July to August

“People would tell us they had tried to book and given up. That is the part that stung — they wanted to come and we made it hard. Now the office finds out about a booking after it has already happened.”

Dana VanceOwner, Thompson River RV Resort

Figures are illustrative of the outcomes this engagement was designed to produce and are shown here for portfolio purposes.

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