Les Bains de Lavey — six years on a multilingual thermal platform

Overview

From 2019 to 2025, I worked with Les Bains de Lavey — a leading thermal destination in the canton of Vaud — on its digital platform: development, UX, online booking, multilingual content, maintenance. The central fact of this case study fits in one sentence: six years of collaboration, season after season.

Client context

Les Bains de Lavey has the hottest thermal water in Switzerland (65 °C). The site covers thermal baths, a Grand Hôtel, a wellness area, restaurants and event spaces — for several audiences at once: bath visitors, hotel guests, gift card buyers, corporate seminar organisers. The site is information-dense and available in French, English and German.

The online shop covers bath access, treatments, stays, classes and a range of more than 150 gift card designs. Hotel bookings and seminar requests run on external systems, integrated into the site’s journeys. The establishment is part of the EuroThermes group — public site: bains-lavey.ch.

My role

Senior independent developer, from 2019 to 2025. Over those years, the scope covered: website development and evolution, WordPress and PHP, JavaScript, responsive design, UX and navigation, forms, booking and e-commerce journeys, integrations, analytics, anti-spam protection, and maintenance.

This is not a one-off redesign project. It is a digital product and web engineering engagement: understanding the journeys, improving them, keeping them solid.

Challenges

• A dense site in three languages, where every change must preserve FR/EN/DE consistency.
• Booking and e-commerce journeys are the core of the business — no regression tolerated in high season.
• Content and offers change continuously, without ever degrading the experience.
• A heterogeneous ecosystem: website, shop, external booking systems, webcams, newsletter, reviews.

Solutions

• Every change started from real journeys — booking, information, e-commerce — and was arbitrated by analytics, not opinion.
• Each evolution was covered by multilingual, multi-device regression checks.
• Forms were protected against spam in a high-traffic context.
• Custom modules completed the platform where the standard stack fell short, without disrupting what worked.

Engineering

WordPress and PHP form the platform’s core; JavaScript powers the interfaces and interactions. The day-to-day work ran in continuity: mobile-first responsiveness, performance where traffic demanded it, clean integrations with external services (hotel booking, seminars), and analytics used to make decisions — not as decoration.

Outcome

A six-year engagement, from 2019 to 2025: continuous evolution on a real, seasonally high-traffic site, without ever putting availability at risk. Booking and purchase journeys were improved year after year, in all three languages. Since the engagement ended, the public front-end has kept evolving — redesigns, new templates — on the foundations laid during those six years. The proof this project offers is not a number. It is the duration.

Key expertise

• Production platform evolution
• Booking journey UX
• WordPress · PHP · JavaScript
• Responsive and multilingual (FR/EN/DE)
• Integrations and analytics
• Anti-spam and maintenance

Running a platform that has to last? Let’s talk about your project.