BCT Travel Blog

It took us nearly two years, but we’ve finally uploaded the newest and best version of the Bethel Coach Tours website to date at 11:45 AM on December 24th, 2008!  

Why Did It Take So Long?
It took us a while to get the new site ready because not only does our website contain lots and lots of content (thus lots and lots of pages had to be recreated in their entirety), but we also wanted the new site to give our customers something special – an online experience that we were never able to offer in past version of the site. Of course, from a  visual standpoint too, the site had to look nice, be easy to navigate and to give our customers more options than we ever have as well.

What Does This Version Include?
An incredible amount of thought, effort and man hours were put into designing and implementing a totally new and unique online reservation system so that our tours can now be bought online…

Our friends can now complete our reservation online, save it, edit as necessary and recieve their important documents – right online! Not only is this an obvious time saver for both Bethel Coach Tours and our customers, but it also enables us to go paper free, reducing the amount of paper used to print documents and to send mail by post.

Other features see us bringing back the trip sorter feature as well as a few new ones such as the Tour Map, an interactive world map that shows all the tours we have throughout the world! The itinerary pages for all of our tours have been completely renovated as well, giving you more details on our tours with less clutter. Currently, we are completing tour videos for the majority of our tours which will easily be located from their prospective itinerary pages.

About the Design Process:
As shown (above and right) the majority of the website was sketched as ideas onto paper over the course of two years. Some ideas worked, many were improved upon during creation and some were never put into the site (mostly because we found better ways to implement them). Inspiration was found everywhere – Fashion magazines, Watchtower & Awake! articles, cereal boxes, advertisements, billboards and many other places too. We wanted the new site to be unique, but to have some of the elements that we found in these places too.

Where the Site Stands Currently:
Like any new product, we’re finding things that need a bit of adjusting from day to day. This site is the ‘Beta’ version, which means that we expected to find errors here and there – hoping that our site’s visitors might help us in repairing them as well. So if you see a misspelling, a graphic that seems to be out of place or anything else that you feel may be an error, please don’t hesitate to let us know! More importantly though, enjoy the new Bethel Coach Tours website!