Article published: 9/1/26
Driven by Experience | How VAAN & RocketRez Put Performance in the Driver's Seat
+135% Revenue
+23% Mobile Conversion Rate
+47% Begin Checkout Rate
As North America's leading supercar driving experience, every touchpoint needs to capture the excitement of getting behind the wheel of a Ferrari, Lamborghini, or McLaren. But as the business grew, its legacy WordPress website and booking experience struggled to keep pace with customer expectations, operational complexity, and performance demands.
VAAN partnered with Xtreme Xperience to completely reimagine the digital experience, creating a modern, headless commerce platform powered by the RocketRez API. The result was a faster, more flexible booking ecosystem that significantly improved customer experience while establishing a scalable foundation for future growth.
The Challenge
The project extended well beyond a website redesign. Xtreme Xperience needed to modernize both the customer-facing experience and the underlying technical architecture while preserving critical business integrations.
Key objectives included:
- Modernize a legacy WordPress website with usability and maintenance challenges
- Improve event discoverability and merchandising
- Redesign the booking journey from discovery through checkout
- Standardize analytics across the customer journey
- Empower the marketing team with a modern content management experience
- Improve Core Web Vitals, performance, and scalability
- Build a technical foundation capable of supporting future growth
- Maintain existing integrations including RocketRez, HubSpot, and Mapbox *
Solution
VAAN designed and developed a headless commerce platform built with Next.js and powered by RocketRez. By separating the presentation layer from the booking engine, the team delivered a premium customer experience while maintaining the operational capabilities of RocketRez behind the scenes.
The platform combines a high-performance marketing website, a completely rebuilt booking flow, modern content management, and an enterprise-grade integration architecture designed for speed, reliability, and continuous optimization.
Strategy
Modern Headless Architecture
The platform was rebuilt using Next.js 16, React, and TypeScript, hosted on Vercel for exceptional speed and scalability.
Rather than treating the website as a single monolithic application, VAAN leveraged the Next.js App Router to create isolated applications for marketing, booking, and checkout. Each application maintains its own optimized bundles, caching, and navigation while sharing a common design system, component library, analytics framework, API services, and internationalization layer.
Supporting technologies include:
- DatoCMS for headless content management
- Neon Postgres with Drizzle ORM
- TanStack Query for client-side caching
- GitHub Actions for scheduled automations
- Typed API service architecture for reliability and maintainability
This architecture significantly improves performance today while making future enhancements substantially faster to deliver.
Reimagining the Booking Experience
The original booking flow suffered from fragmented application state spread across cookies, query strings, browser storage, and iframe messaging. Customers frequently encountered broken navigation, lost booking sessions, inconsistent carts, and validation errors late in the checkout process.
VAAN rebuilt the entire booking journey around a centralized state machine that manages navigation, booking state, and customer progress.
Key improvements include:
- Booking progress persists across refreshes, browser tabs, and returning sessions
- Smart, rule-driven page skipping removes unnecessary steps based on each customer's purchase
- Reactive validation surfaces issues early instead of during checkout submission
- Deep links from marketing pages are validated server-side
- Structured payment messaging creates a more reliable checkout experience
The result is a faster, more intuitive booking journey that reduces friction and helps more customers successfully complete their purchase.
RocketRez Integration Built for Performance
RocketRez remains the operational system of record for inventory, scheduling, and reservations, but the customer experience no longer depends on live browser requests to the RocketRez API.
Instead, VAAN designed a resilient integration architecture that dramatically improves speed and reliability.
Key enhancements include:
- Postgres caching for products, events, and schedules
- Automated synchronization every 15 minutes using GitHub Actions
- Typed schema validation for every API payload
- Service layer with retry logic, OAuth token management, and normalized error handling
- Server-managed mutations that automatically invalidate client caches
By removing API latency from the customer journey, the new platform delivers a significantly faster booking experience while protecting against third-party outages, rate limits, and inconsistent responses.
RocketRez exists to help independent attractions earn more revenue. Xtreme Xperience is exactly the kind of ambitious and innovative operator that can take full advantage of the platform; they built their entire digital experience on the RocketRez API. We regularly hear prospects and customers cite the XX checkout as top tier, and with revenue up 135%, it's become the new benchmark for what a RocketRez-powered experience can deliver.
Bill Nason, VP of Revenue and Customer Operations, RocketRez
Flexible Content Management
To eliminate the maintenance challenges of WordPress, VAAN replaced the legacy CMS with DatoCMS and created a modular page builder.
Marketing teams can now build pages using a library of reusable components without developer involvement.
The system includes:
- 30 reusable content block types
- 40 shared UI components
- 9 pre-built page templates
- Draft, review, and scheduled publishing workflows
- Version-controlled content models deployed alongside application code
This gives the Xtreme Xperience team far greater flexibility while maintaining consistency across the site.
Built for Continuous Optimization
The platform was designed as a foundation for ongoing experimentation and growth rather than a one-time redesign.
With standardized analytics, reusable components, modular architecture, and a flexible content system, the team can continuously launch improvements, test new ideas, and optimize conversion without major development efforts.
Technology Stack
- Next.js
- React
- TypeScript
- DatoCMS
- RocketRez API
- Neon Postgres + Drizzle ORM
- TanStack Query
- Zustand
- HubSpot
- Sendlane
- Zendesk
- Mapbox
- Vercel
- GitHub Actions
Project Scale
The implementation included:
- 225 GitHub pull requests
- 96,500 lines of TypeScript and SCSS
- 40 core UI components
- 30 reusable page sections
- 9 page templates
- 75 custom React hooks
- 38 utility functions
- 24 API routes
- 14 backend services
Results
The impact of the new RocketRez-powered platform was immediate.
Compared to the previous experience:
- Revenue increased by 135%
- Overall conversion rate increased by 19%
- Mobile conversion rate increased by 23%
- Begin checkout rate increased by 47%
- Mobile revenue increased by 111%
- Desktop revenue increased by 30%
- Active users reaching product and booking pages increased by 81%
By combining a modern headless architecture with a conversion-focused customer experience and a resilient RocketRez integration, VAAN transformed Xtreme Xperience's website from a legacy booking tool into a scalable, high-performance commerce platform built for long-term growth.
