LockTrip is starting the year with a new deployment, marketplace migration to the root domain and many new improvements. In this article we want to explore some of the changes made.
Moving the Marketplace to www.LockTrip.com
The first and most important feature of this deployment is the migration from beta.LockTrip.com to the root domain www.LockTrip.com. What does that mean for users?
First of all, it is easier to find www.LockTrip.com through a direct search input from the search bar. Many users prefer to directly search through it for quicker access, which is also the intuitive behavior of many first-time users.
As LockTrip.com is now the home of the marketplace, all project/ICO related sections are moved to secondary pages. It is one of many steps that reflect the continuous process of moving out of the ICO environment.
Last but not least, we are officially moving out of “beta” in accordance to the completion of all four major milestones presented a few months ago:
- Deploying 500,000+ Hotels and Properties
- Integrating LOC Economy 2.0
- Deploying the new Blue Design
- Integrating Crypto Payments
The next 3–4 months will be fully dedicated towards preparing the marketplace for the marketing initiative push unveiled last month, both in terms of improving the user experience and developing the required affiliates tools.
That being said, let’s get back to today’s deployment.
Filter Improvements
The price slider is now dynamically adjusting to the range of the specific search. In the example below, $21 would be the cheapest available hotel and $1,470 the most expensive one.
Filtering overlaps that occurred for certain display resolutions have also been fixed.
Stability & Speed
Rate limiting modules that caused website instability have been improved. At the same time the loading speeds of hotel details pages are now much quicker. Further improvements on that front are on their way as we optimize the code and back-end components related to the new design.
In addition, logging in or registering on the marketplace does not trigger a reload of the search results. Previously searched results remain unchanged.
Usability
The “Sydney” card on the main page was incorrectly leading to a city in Canada, which has been fixed.
Returning from the billing information page to the hotel details page resulted in the screen briefly flashing and there was a small bug with signing out while being in the profile dashboard. Both have been fixed as well.
Sometimes users are returning to a search page hours after initiating the search. In these cases it is very likely that the displayed prices are no longer up to date. One of the newly added features is a time-out notification to alert the user about expired prices.
As a final item on this front, date selection has now become more intuitive.
Map Improvements
We identified a weakness with map loading times that sometimes lead to display issues, which has been fixed with this release. In addition there are also improvements on the “nearby hotels” feature within the hotel details page.
Nearby hotels also did not display hotel stars correctly.
Texts & Links
Our terms & conditions are now directly linked in the registration window. We have also made a number of text adjustments throughout the marketplace.
Other Improvements
Our database engine has seen a complete upgrade with this deployment. This has no direct visible impact, but is a critical component of back-end operations — maybe even the most central element of this deployment.
A number of improvements have been made to the built-in wallet, such as improving the wallet password resetting flow and fixing previously identified errors (some of which were pending for some time).
Important Notes
- Expect maintenance on our mobile apps for the next few hours as they adopt to the new database upgrade.
- All referral links that lead to the previous marketplace domain automatically redirect to the root domain. Nevertheless we recommend our affiliates to do their own checks.
We are already working towards the next deployment as we complete more and more tasks in our to-do list for the next few months in order to deliver as many new features and improvements as possible.
www.LockTrip.com is now Live
Enjoy your savings!
