Come Back Soon Tracker

Note: Come Back Soon Tracker is no longer operational. Center Parcs updated their website in a way that made it no longer economically viable to continue running the service. During its time, Come Back Soon Tracker helped holiday makers save hundreds of pounds on their bookings.

Helping Center Parcs UK guests save money

Come Back Soon Tracker was a web-based service that monitored Center Parcs UK bookings on behalf of guests. It automatically checked if the price of a guest's booking had decreased and sent an email alert if it did.

If you booked your stay at Center Parcs UK with the Come Back Soon Offer (or generally had the Price Promise applied to your booking) you could then claim a refund for the price difference. The Price Promise states that if a guest finds the same break at a lower price after booking, Center Parcs will refund the difference.

However, Center Parcs doesn't proactively notify guests if the price drops which leaves it up to the holiday maker to manually check the current prices for their booking themselves.

Come Back Soon Tracker solved this problem by continuously monitoring prices. For a small £9 fee per booking, the service saved guests hundreds of pounds - we know this first hand.

Inspired by real savings

The idea for Come Back Soon Tracker came from Add Jam co-founder Michael's personal experience. Like many families in the UK Michael had booked a break at Sherwood Forest Center Parcs in summer 2023. Michael's wife happened to recheck the booking price on the lead up to their break.

She discovered the price had decreased and they were eligible for a refund of over £200 under the Come Back Soon Offer. As Center Parcs hadn't notified them, they would have missed out on these savings if not for the manual price check.

Realising that many Center Parcs guests are likely leaving money on the table, Michael decided to build Come Back Soon Tracker to help automate the process of regularly checking for price drops.

How it worked

Here's how Come Back Soon Tracker worked:

1. Guests signed up and entered their Center Parcs booking details (village, dates, accommodation type, number of guests etc).
2. Come Back Soon Tracker securely saved this information.
3. The service automatically checked the booking price at least once per day.
4. If the price had decreased, it alerted the guest via email with instructions for how to claim the price difference refund from Center Parcs.
5. The guest contacted Center Parcs to request a refund under the Come Back Soon / Price Promise offer, keeping more money in their pocket.

The £9 fee covered monitoring the booking price from sign up through to the check-in date. Guests only paid if Come Back Soon Tracker confirmed it was successfully monitoring their booking.

Sharing hints and tips

We figured there was more to getting the most value out of Center Parcs than just tracking the price promise. That's why we created a blog where we collated Center Parcs UK hints and tips to help guests make the most of their breaks.

Technical Details

Come Back Soon Tracker was a web application built using the Ruby on Rails framework. Key features included:

• Secure user sign up and management
• Integration with Center Parcs booking system to fetch current prices
• Automated daily price checks using background jobs
• Email alerts to notify guests of price drops
• Stripe integration for payment processing

The application was deployed on scalable cloud infrastructure that allowed Add Jam to run Come Back Soon Tracker as a reliable service to Center Parcs users.

Why the service ended

Center Parcs updated their website in a way that significantly increased the complexity of maintaining the price monitoring integration. After evaluating the ongoing development effort required to keep the service running, we determined it was no longer economically viable to continue.

We're proud that during its operation, Come Back Soon Tracker helped holiday makers save hundreds of pounds on their Center Parcs bookings.

Build your own SaaS product

If you have an idea for your own web application or SaaS product, contact Add Jam. Our expert team of Ruby on Rails and JavaScript developers can bring it to life, just like we did with Come Back Soon Tracker.