Ti' Dola Sab

The need

The owners of a holiday cottage on Marie-Galante wanted guests to book directly, with no platform commission, and to manage bookings, payments and guests simply. Behind that request were two expectations I had to bring to the surface: trusting that the price shown is right, and never losing a booking.

Clarifying and specifying

• Making implicit rules explicit. Seasons, minimum stays by period, tourist tax, deposit then balance: these rules lived in the owners’ heads. I rephrased them, tested them against real cases, then wrote them down.
• One rule, one place. Pricing is described in a single, readable place that can be updated every year without touching anything else.
• Two audiences. Visitors from mainland France comparing with booking platforms, locals mostly checking availability: the booking flow had to convince the former without slowing down the latter.

Architecture choices

• The server is the single source of truth for prices. The interface shows an estimate, but the amount is always recomputed server-side when booking: showing one price and charging another is impossible.
• The migration as a project in its own right. The first version had to make way for a sound codebase. A phased plan, an isolated staging, the migration rehearsed on a copy of the real data, a short, prepared cut-over.
• Guardrails rather than vigilance. Automated tests on business rules, staging data covering every booking case, production error tracking.

Results

New version in production since 13 November 2026, with no data lost.

• A lighter site. Main script compressed from 200 to 61 KB, stylesheet from 23 to 5.5 KB: about one second saved on a first visit over 3G.
• Photos at the right size. Every image exists in several sizes and the browser picks the one that fits the screen: the full-screen viewer downloads 10 MB instead of 23 for the whole gallery, a mobile banner weighs under 30 KB.
• Nothing downloaded twice. One-year cache on site files, each page’s banner preloaded, gallery loaded as you scroll.
• An instant back office. The full client list comes back in about fifty milliseconds, with immediate search and sorting.

Next steps

• Platform connections. Sync bookings and availability with Booking and Airbnb through their APIs, for a single calendar and no double bookings.
• Prospect follow-ups. Automatically follow up on enquiries that did not turn into a booking, to convert more of them directly.