Case study · Travel · Content & booking
Book the Falls Every great waterfall on earth, and how to actually go.
165 waterfalls in 51 countries, each with what you can do there, when it flows and where to book.
01 — The brief
The problem it solves
Most waterfall content online is a ranked list of photographs. None of it tells a traveller that the rafting stops in February, that the falls run dry in the wrong month, or what it costs to get in.
The brief was a guide built around one question — what can you actually do there, and when? — with booking links that never get to decide the ranking.
02 — What we built
Features that do real work.
Find your falls
A six-question matcher — month, region, activities, walking effort, waterfall type, who's coming — that scores all 165 falls and explains its scoring.
World map
Clustered markers with a continent filter. The map library only loads when the map scrolls into view.
The index
Search plus filters for continent, activity, UNESCO status, drops over 200 m, easy access and full-guide coverage.
Peak season, right now
Each falls page has a month strip that checks today's date and tells you whether this is the month to go.
Booking where it belongs
A sticky “Book this trip” bar on guide pages, split panels like Zimbabwe or Zambia?, and a “How it compares” block for the most similar, tallest and widest falls.
03 — How it's put together
Structure
Templated pages hang off one dataset: a page per waterfall, per month, per country, per adventure type and per waterfall type, plus curated lists and regional guides. Every new waterfall automatically appears in the right month, country and activity pages.
Under the hood
- Self-hosted woff2 fonts with tuned fallbacks, WebP imagery, and a preloaded hero image with high fetch priority
- Schema: TouristAttraction, FAQPage and BreadcrumbList on every falls page; CollectionPage and ItemList on listings; WebSite with SearchAction
- Partner links marked
rel="sponsored"; independent operators listed alongside them - Accessible animated headings: screen-reader text and reduced-motion support
Details that matter
- “No sponsored rankings, ever” — and independent guides are listed even where the site earns nothing
- Each full guide is signed with the date it was checked and the number of sources behind it
- A printable one-page planning sheet per guide
Programmatic scale without the thin-content feel: one structured dataset drives hundreds of pages, but every page answers a real planning question first and sells second.
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