Wanderdesk
Independent stays, booked without the double-booking.
- Client
- Albion Travel Collective
- Year
- 2018
- Duration
- 6 months
- Team size
- 4 engineers
Interactive Demo
A hands-on mock of the product we built — click around.
Demo interface shown in English.
The challenge
The collective’s members sold rooms on their own websites and four OTA channels, updating availability by hand; double bookings ran at roughly one per property per month — each one a refunded night, an apology and a scathing review. Most hosts were not technical; many managed everything from a phone behind the breakfast bar, yet the channel managers on the market assumed revenue managers and PMS integrations they did not have. Seasonality was brutal: August brought nine times January’s traffic, and the collective wanted direct bookings to grow so commission stopped eating 17% of every stay. The platform had to be simple enough for a phone and robust enough for August.
Our solution
We built Wanderdesk on Node.js and PostgreSQL with a Redis-backed availability cache as the single source of truth: every booking, block or cancellation propagates to all channels in under five seconds through iCal feeds and two-way API connectors. A Stripe-powered booking engine lets each property take direct, commission-free reservations with a two-tap checkout tuned for mobile. The pricing engine nudges rates by occupancy, local events and lead time, and hosts approve suggestions with one thumb. The whole front end is a Vue PWA designed for one-handed use, and the platform autoscaled through August at nine times baseline with zero manual intervention.
Results
Technology stack
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