School Trips Portal: Digital Platform for School Field Trip Management

The client — one of Brazil’s most recognized children’s entertainment brands — lacked a dedicated technology solution for managing school trips. The entire lifecycle, from initial school negotiation through promotion, pre-sale, post-sale, and confirmation, was managed in a decentralized way, with no single platform integrating all stakeholders (Park, Schools, Promoters, Agencies, Transport Suppliers, and Parents/Guardians).

The absence of a dedicated portal made operations dependent on manual processes, scattered emails, spreadsheets, and informal WhatsApp communications — creating risks of information inconsistencies, financial management errors, and scalability limits.

There was no legacy trip management system: a complete gap in digitalization. Key inefficiencies included no centralized registry of schools, products, and schedules; manual marketing distribution with no tracking of access origin or conversion channels; no automated control of partial payments, refunds, and stakeholder splits; no digital signature for authorization forms; and no real-time trip participation indicators.

Without automation, the operation could not scale. Every incremental trip required the same manual effort, making growth mathematically inefficient and capping the volume of trips the team could process — directly threatening a recurring, high-volume revenue channel.

The risks spanned four dimensions:

• Operational bottleneck: each new trip required proportional manual effort, preventing growth without team expansion.
• Financial risk: manual management of payment splits and settlement across multiple stakeholders increased the likelihood of discrepancies and defaults.
• Compliance risk: absence of digital signatures and structured authorization documentation created legal exposure.
• Limited scalability: without QR Code tracking and per-channel conversion metrics, marketing investment could not be optimized.

Meanwhile, theme park and children’s attraction operators already adopting digital group-sales solutions were gaining a competitive advantage.

BRISA designed and developed the School Trips Portal — a complete custom web platform serving as the digital hub among all stakeholders in the client’s school trip ecosystem. Built from scratch (greenfield) and delivered as Docker containers for deployment on the client’s own infrastructure (AWS or Azure), it covers the full trip lifecycle across four functional modules.

Functional Modules

• Administrative (Park / General Admin): school registration with approval workflow, trip registration and approval, product and ticket-package management, user management by profile, per-trip payment configuration, performance dashboards and reports.
• Promotion & Marketing: per-trip digital file repository, customizable message templates with dynamic TAGs (school, date, price, time, link), optimized WhatsApp sharing with branded images, QR Code-based access tracking on physical materials.
• Pre-Sale (Parents/Guardians): personalized trip page with unique link, registration and authentication, ticket purchase with multiple payment methods (credit, debit, Pix, partial payment, cash), automatic notifications for declined payments and abandoned carts, digital signature for authorization forms.
• Post-Sale & Confirmation: sales closure linked to trip confirmation with reversal for authorized profiles, settlement with partial/final reporting and export, automated and manual payment split, rescheduling and cancellation with categorized reasons and history log.

Technical Differentiators

• Real-time financial automation: payment splits on purchase and automatic refund processing per acquirer timeline
• Smart marketing tracking via unique QR Codes per physical material for per-channel conversion metrics
• Complete multi-level approval workflow (school registration, trip scheduling, user profiles)
• Per-trip configuration flexibility (toggleable payment methods, confirmation deadlines, digital or physical authorization)
• Granular permission control across six user profiles, with audit logs and reversal of critical actions

Delivery followed an Agile, 8-phase methodology (Planning → Requirements → Modeling → Development → Testing → Acceptance Testing → Deployment → Training & Transition), each phase with formal client-signed Acceptance Terms. Full source code was delivered to the client for independent evolution.

The School Trips Portal positions the client as a benchmark in the digitalization of theme park operations in Brazil. With a proprietary, integrated platform, the company can offer a superior purchase and tracking experience for schools, promoters, and parents/guardians; scale processed trip volume without a linear increase in operational cost; track and optimize physical and digital marketing with precise per-channel conversion data; and differentiate from competitors still relying on manual processes or generic e-commerce.

The containerized architecture allows horizontal scaling as volume grows, and the modular design (configurable payment methods, access profiles, message templates, and cancellation rules) adapts to new scenarios without further development. The same pattern — group sales with multiple intermediaries, trackable marketing, payment splitting, and a structured post-sale cycle — extends to zoos, aquariums, tourist attractions, tour operators, event centers, museums, and any B2B2C operation where the buyer differs from the end user.