Travel And Hospitality Booking Website

Travel sites fail in a specific way: they look complete and cannot actually book. Search returns properties, but availability comes from a channel manager, prices shift between the search and the checkout, and the terms are different on every property.

The build treated the channel manager as the source of truth and the site as a presentation layer. Availability and price are read at the point of display, and the booking is confirmed against a re-check rather than trusting a cached figure, because a price held from search to checkout is the fastest way to lose a guest’s trust.

Destination content was written for staff rather than developers, because the people who know a destination are not the people building the site. Property pages follow one template so a new property can be added without design work, which matters when the portfolio changes several times a season.

Terms and conditions vary per property, so they were modelled as data attached to each property instead of a single site-wide page. That was more work at the start and removed an entire category of dispute.

Testing ran the full journey on a mobile connection with images disabled, which is roughly how a lot of the traffic behaves, and included the cancellation path as well as the booking path.

Handover included the channel manager mapping and the rules for when a price must be re-checked.