Travelessence – a vacation rental website

Scope

• Website design
• WordPress theme development
• WooCommerce and WooCommerce Bookings customization
• WordPress plugin development and API integration with Guesty.com

Background

Throughout this project, I designed and developed a vacation rental website for Travelessence, where their customers could easily make reservations for their visit to Okinawa or Tokyo.

I also developed a plugin to integrate the site with rental property management platform, Guesty.com and keep the databases and booking calendars synchronized. 

The website had to communicate the company’s established brand efficiently, and work flawlessly with heavily customized e-commerce plugins, therefore I decided to write a custom WordPress theme instead of utilizing existing ones.

Besides promoting the company and introducing its expertise, the main goal of the website was to generate revenue by attracting customers, building trust, and allowing for simple vacation rental management.

Aside from listing the properties on different online travel agencies such as Airbnb, Bookings.com, and Ctrip – Travelessence wanted to market their rental homes on their own website. It allowed them to showcase rental properties to both customers and investors without the competition of other real estates. It also created an opportunity to offer vacation rentals without the service fees charged by the travel agencies and hosting sites. 

Challenge

The existing ecommerce solutions for WordPress – such as WooCommerce – were not designed to sell intangible products or services, and even utilizing it together with WooCommerce Bookings, an extension designed for rental management purposes, I had to make considerable customizations to make it fit the requirements.

The greatest challenge, however, was integrating the website with Guesty.com, a system TravelEssence used to manage bookings made on the different platforms. 

To synchronize the reservations coming through the new website with the ones from other platforms, I designed and developed a WordPress plugin. It used Guesty’s API to update both Guesty’s and the company’s databases.

Solution

1. Guesty provides an API for customers to access and manage their data. This made it possible to integrate the TravelEssence website with Guesty. I developed a plugin that handled the communication between the two applications through Guesty’s API.

• Calendar synchronization: the plugin pulled the bookings made on various platforms and populated the booking calendar with available, partially available and booked days before displaying it to the visitors. 
• Database management: after a successfully booking, it saved the reservation data in TravelEssence’s database and pushed it to the central database maintained by Guesty.
• The plugin kept the management and marketing informed about the state of each booking and their Guesty synchronization on the admin interface of the website.

2. Further, I customized both WooCommerce and WooCommerce Bookings plugins to adjust their functionalities and appearance. 

• Redesigned the WooCommerce template and plugin, displaying vacation rentals and details more efficiently, resulting in a more useable layout with less hidden information.
• Redesigned the booking calendar to create a more intuitive and user-friendly check in and check out experience. 
• Rewrote the plugins’ price calculation to fully adhere to the company’s pricing polic