Vila Flamuri
Golem, Albania. Holiday apartments. vilaflamuri.com
Where this started
A family house of 15 apartments a couple of hundred metres from the sea, filling its rooms through the big booking sites and paying a cut on every one of them.
The same guest costs less when they arrive directly. So the site had to be worth finding first, and then worth writing to.
What we built
- A site in English, Italian and Albanian, where the words in each route are in that language rather than an English address with a flag beside it.
- A date picker written for this site instead of pulled from a library, because the calendar is a few kilobytes of work and the library is a few dozen.
- A request that gathers the dates, the guests and the age of each child, then opens WhatsApp with the whole message already written out.
- A walking route to the beach drawn from map data when the site is built, and a street map that loads nothing at all until somebody asks for it.
- A weight budget the build refuses to go over, and not one request to anybody else on any page.
Where a booking starts now
In a message the guest writes themselves, with the dates already in it. Nothing is held automatically, because a family with 15 apartments answers faster than an availability system would stay truthful.
The site does not pretend to be a portal. It gives the guest a reason to write directly, and the family a reason to answer quickly.
A booking nobody takes a cut of.
Updated