National Parks e-ticketing platform

A digital e-ticketing platform to replace paper park passes with scalable online services across Kakadu, Uluru-Kata Tjuta and Booderee National Parks.

Challenge

The Director of National Parks runs Kakadu, Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa and Booderee on behalf of their traditional owners. Every visitor pass was paper.

That had three costs. Parks knew almost nothing about who was visiting, so it could not market to them. An anonymous paper ticket can be handed to the next traveller, and plenty were. And a flat printed price cannot vary by season or by type of visitor.

A waterfall procurement started in mid-2015 to fix it. By December the best response came in at three times the available budget, with twelve months of delivery against a launch date four months away.

Solution

We were engaged in early January 2016. Four FTE: a part-time delivery manager, a tech lead, a front-end developer, a back-end developer and an automated test developer, on two-week sprints to the Digital Service Standard.

February was prototypes in front of tour operators in Darwin, and that research changed where the work went. March was a working Alpha on AWS behind heavily automated DevOps. April was a fully featured Beta, soft-launched to early customers. The system went live for everyone in May, a few days ahead of the 1 May deadline.

Underneath: Python and Django, PEP8, Sphinx for documentation, and a Lettuce, Splinter and Selenium BDD stack holding above 80% automated coverage. Twelve-factor throughout, stateless containers taking configuration from backing services. Payments through the Mastercard MIGS gateway. The source lives in Parks Australia’s own GitHub account.

We have sustained and extended it ever since, including the helpdesk for both the system and park visitors.

Outcomes

More than $10 million in pass sales a year. The build cost came back four times over in the first three months of operation.

E-tickets reached 90% of sales volume. Named electronic tickets ended the pass-sharing problem outright. More than 100 post-production releases have gone out through automated CI/CD without a failure.

The data changed what Parks could do: real traveller analytics, and marketing campaigns that moved visitor numbers. Being responsive to what park staff and tour operators actually needed changed those relationships too.

Kakadu’s platform went on to serve Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa and Booderee, then campsite and venue bookings, merchandise and digital wallet integration. An ANAO audit found full compliance and no adverse findings. It won the Secretary’s Award for best project in the portfolio, and Parks was among the first agencies to meet the Digital Service Standard.

Digitising the Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa passes alone removed more than 200,000 pieces of paper a year.

Technologies

Python and Django with PEP8 and Sphinx. React on the front end. PostgreSQL. Elasticsearch for search and analytics. Lettuce, Splinter, Selenium and Cucumber for BDD. Jenkins for CI/CD, Sentry for error monitoring. AWS, stateless containers, twelve-factor. Mastercard MIGS. Source in Parks Australia’s GitHub.

Who this belongs to

Under the EPBC Act 1999 the Commonwealth runs these parks on behalf of their traditional owners: the Bininj and Mungguy people at Kakadu, the Yankunytjatjara and Pitjantjatjara people at Uluṟu-Kata Tjuṯa, and the Wreck Bay people at Booderee. The long-term plan is for management to return to them.

So the system was built to be handed over. Modular, open-source, no licence fees and no vendor constraints waiting for whoever operates it next.