Website Design for local Holiday Cottage (with Airbnb & Owners Direct sync)

Torr Farm Cottages based near Slapton (between Dartmouth & Kingsbridge) needed a website for thier new business.

As a startup in the very competative holiday cottage industry, the holiday cottage relies on bookings from Airbnb & Owners Direct, so it was of utmost importance that that site could sync an availabilty calendar with these services.

From Static to Wordpress - a Holiday Cottage Website

The most complex part of deciding how to build this holiday cottage website was finding the best solution for syncing between the website, Airbnb and Owners Direct. 

A number of solutions were found and to start with a static site (super fast and secure) was designed using Laravel Jigsaw (my favourite static site framework) and using an online system to manage booking enquiries and syncing bookings.  Torr Farm Cottages would have logged into the online system to manage their bookings (rather than logging into the website itself).

After the static site was ready, it was revealed that Torr Farm Cottages would over time be renovating and launching more cottages and a Shepherds Hut - because of this, in the long run, the decided on online service was not going to work out as the most cost effective solution for managing multiple porperties, so a different solution was found.

The final Torr Farm Cottages website is a Wordpress based website with integrated property booking management system built into the website - now Torr Farm Cottages can log into their own site to manage bookings, prices etc. bookings are synced with Airnbnb and Owners Direct. 

The transition from the static Laravel Jigsaw site to Wordpress was quick and simple - using Sage Roots (a Wordpress theme development software) the already created templates could be moved across easily since both Laravel Jigsaw and Roots both use Laravel's Blade templating engine.