For a flights and holiday business who supply to more than 10 million customers per year*, their online sales platform has become a more important tool than ever before. I’ve been fortunate to work with Jet2 on 2 separate occasions, rebuilding and refactoring their existing booking process for Jet2.com and Jet2Holidays.com.

When I first arrived at Jet2 back in 2015, I worked on a small team of frontend developers involved in bringing the Jet2.com flights website up to date and fully responsive. This involved not only working closely with other frontend developers; but also designers, product owners and backend developers. By creating a digital styleguide we were able to vastly reduce the amount of code as well as introduce frontend standards for coding CSS and Javascript components.

The primary goal of this project was to identify the booking path first, and rebuild that process before tackling the remainder of the website. I personally championed the rebuild of the seat and meal selector in the process, painstakingly building a scale model of a seating plan of the inside of a plane that allows customer to choose where they would like to sit on their flights, all fully responsive of course!

The site is built on a custom Wordpress theme and was built by another developer before I got involved in the project (bringing it’s own set of challenges). The theme makes use of Grunt pre-processors for SASS compilation, JS minification and image optimisation. The main challenge with the site was Rich wanted it to behave like a single page application (SPA), but having been built in old-fashioned Wordpress this was difficult to achieve, so optimising individual pages and components on a small scale became important.

The last piece of work with Rich was to re-design and re-build his homepage, the old homepage lacked relevant content and internal links. So when he approached me with a new concept I was excited straight away.

Booking.com is the biggest online reservations and car rental provider. To be involved with their growing car rental offering was an incredible experience working with a great team. We analysed real user behaviour to make informed decisions to test, develop and improve the websites features.

The project at a glace…

• Car rental proposition for Booking.com
• Re-branding and re-platforming to modern tech
• Data-driven feature development
• Huge user base and thousands of daily bookings

My role with the team was as a frontend developer. That is building out new features using HTML, CSS and Javascript. During my time I was also involved in the initial stages of re-platforming some existing components into ReactJS components.

The Rentalcars.com also acts as a whitelabel platform for many other brands running on the same platform. This project contained a whole bunch of CSS themes for each of these brands that needed to be maintained. I championed some optimisations of the day-to-day workflow on this project; introducing the team to live-reloading and Browsersync to speed up the development process.