OHM Tour Booking Automation [2025]
<Project Overview>
Open House Melbourne (OHM) is an independent not-for-profit organisation that fosters public appreciation for architecture and public engagement in conversations about the future of our cities. Their flagship event happens in July with over 200 buildings open to the public. While some offer self guided tours, over 100 buildings each year require advance bookings. With multiple tour sessions across a weekend, managing bookings manually was consuming significant resources and creating operational bottlenecks. Efront partnered with OHM to create an intelligent automation solution using n8n, transforming their tour management from a manual, time-intensive process into a streamlined, real-time system that saves hours of work while providing superior customer experience.
<Sector>
<client>
Open House Melbourne
Every year, Open House Melbourne faced the same time-consuming challenge of managing over 100 buildings with multiple tour sessions each. Staff members had to manually create hundreds of events in the Humanitix booking platform, with no real-time visibility into booking capacity or sell-out status. The website displayed static information that couldn’t reflect live booking status, while disconnected systems between their Airtable CRM and Humanitix bookings created operational silos. This resource-intensive process drained staff time that could have been better focused on strategic event planning and community engagement.
Efront designed and implemented an automation solution using n8n that created a seamless integration between Open House Melbourne’s existing systems.
When new tour entries are added to Airtable, the system automatically creates corresponding events in Humanitix. The automation intelligently maps building details, dates and times while simultaneously querying Google’s location services to retrieve precise latitude and longitude coordinates along with Google Place IDs for each venue. This geographical enhancement ensures that tour participants receive accurate location data and can easily navigate to buildings using their preferred mapping applications.
The system provides continuous synchronization by monitoring booking numbers across all tours in real-time. It automatically detects when tours reach capacity, immediately updating status information back to Airtable and the OHM website with current booking levels. Real-time updates ensure that website visitors always see accurate availability information, significantly enhancing their user experience and reducing frustration that comes from attempting to book already-full tours.
The automation eliminated over 20 hours of manual data entry annually while achieving 100% accuracy in event creation and status updates. The integration with Google location services ensures that every venue has precise geographical data, enhancing the user experience for tour participants who can now navigate confidently to each building. Real-time booking data and capacity management provide unprecedented visibility into event performance.
n8n provides a visual workflow builder with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface that makes complex integrations accessible and manageable. With extensive integrations including over 400 pre-built connectors for popular business tools and services like Google’s location APIs, it offers the flexibility to connect virtually any system your business uses. The platform’s custom logic capabilities through flexible scripting accommodate unique business requirements, while its cost-effective open-source foundation delivers enterprise-grade reliability without the enterprise price tag. The scalable architecture seamlessly handles everything from simple automations to complex enterprise workflows that grow with your business needs.
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