As Poslovni Dnevnik/Marija Crnjak writes, the global coronavirus pandemic contributed to the creation of the very first Croatian application for designing school trips, with which the Split agency Eklata alleviated the problem of a lack of staff and accelerated the process of selecting one-day trips for schoolchildren.
The real breakthrough of the Izlet hr application, which has been on the market since the beginning of this school year, will show itself in just a few days, because the beginning of spring is the traditional time for arranging one-day trips for schoolchildren, and by the beginning of the next school year, a version for multi-day trips, including high school graduates, will be ready.
“We’ve had this idea for a long time now, because we wanted to speed up and simplify the procedures for designing school trips and offers that will meet demand. As we always strive to be innovative and follow trends in our work, and we’ve digitised our business to a great extent, a mobile application was a natural sequence. The coronavirus pandemic gave us time to develop our product, which took us about one year, and the app has been available since last autumn.
There was also a trial period in which Izlet hr proved to be very useful and easy to use, but now schools are starting to plan school trips and as such we expect full implementation,” said Jurica Glavina, the owner of Eklata. The web and mobile application Izlet hr is free and available to everyone, and through it, teachers, parents, and students can independently create an offer for a school trip somewhere in Croatia.
This skips the need for any lengthy communication between the agency and the user as the application is fully automated and the agency’s employees are involved only at the last step.
Until then, users can specifically enter all the necessary information about their desired excursion into the app, from the number of passengers and the desired destination to the topic of the trip and the specific content they’re interested in, with an overview of service prices.
“After deciding which county you want to go to, you can choose whether the excursion will be out in nature or whether the students want to see cultural and historical sights, visit galleries and museums… You can decide on one or a combination of different content, for example, you can add lunch to the offer. You simply click or “drag&drop” your selections, enter the number of students and you’ll immediately find out the price and terms of payment,” explained Glavina.
With the very next click, an offer is requested, which the app generates independently and which arrives by email in an instant, and by clicking ”accept”, a team of tourism workers, pedagogues and educators start preparing an educational and fun school trop, so it’s actually a fully tailor-made service.
Mirko Vukusic from the Split-based company Banica Trade is responsible for the creation of the application, and he took special care to create a maximally simple interface which will be attractive and easy for all generations who decide on school trips. The next step is an expanded application for excursions, which is expected this September, with the beginning of the next school year, but Glavina added that it is a product that can be modified for all other group trips. Eklata doesn’t intend to offer this product to other agencies, but will instead use the application for its own services.
Izleti hr has begun work in the first year since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in which the old dynamics of organising school trips are expected to return, although this year will also be challenging due to rising prices and a lack of workers in the sector.
“During the pandemic, many agencies changed things, there are fewer bus operators, and prices have risen, and all of this will affect traffic,” concluded Glavina.
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