A booking system for a kayak rental

Context

The rental’s bottleneck is not the kayaks but the vans with trailers that drive people to the start and collect them from the finish. The owner took bookings by phone and personally made sure trip starts and pick-ups did not overlap. Packaged booking tools do not know that constraint.

What I built

Customer booking

• A route, a date and a start time, two- and three-seat kayaks in a cart, online payment at any hour.
• Przelewy24 payment: the full amount up front, or a 30% deposit.
• Email confirmation to the customer and to the owner. A payment that breaks off gets a link to finish it.
• Fixed and percentage discount codes with usage limits. When two apply, the system picks the better one for the customer.
• Booking closes two days before the trip, so the day’s run sheet is known in advance.

Availability and pricing

• A route is a pair of points, start and finish, with a distance, a paddling time and the hours it may set off.
• The van rule: a start time booked on one route disappears from the others, because the vans serve one direction at a time.
• Availability counted day by day and kayak by kayak. A three-day trip takes those particular boats out of all three days.
• Three price lists: standard, weekend and multi-day.

Staff panel

• Bookings, availability, kayaks, prices, discounts, customers, locations, routes and start hours, all changed without a developer.
• A “today” view for the drivers: today’s departures, times and places.
• Staff accounts. Changes to the site go live without a break in sales.

Kayak tracking on the river

• The position of every kayak live on a map, via GPS.
• The drivers see when a group is reaching the finish and get there on time, instead of waiting around or arriving late.
• Customers feel safer: if anything happens on the river, their position is known and help goes straight to them.

Outcome

A third season of online sales with no phone calls and no double bookings. The customer books and pays in minutes, the drivers see the day’s departures in the morning and the position of every group on the river during the day, the owner changes prices and discounts alone. The owner is no longer tied to the phone or planning the day in his head: bookings, payments and van logistics fit together by themselves, and his time goes to the customers on site. Over three seasons of running, the system has needed only a handful of small changes a year.