Experience
Every experience the hotel sells, bookable in seconds, in ten languages, found by Google and by AI assistants alike. A direct-to-guest storefront for a luxury Santorini hotel, with live availability and instant confirmation.
experience-northsantorini.com
At a glance
- Challenge
- Evenings, tables and spa hours sold by phone, email, WhatsApp and a notebook at the front desk.
- What we built
- A direct storefront in ten languages, with an admin panel and a partner portal on one codebase.
- Outcome
- 1,000+
- guests registered in six months
- Sold direct, with no marketplace commission.
- Platform
- Experience
- Scope
- Guest site, admin panel, partner portal
- Sales
- Direct, no marketplace commission
- Build
- 9.5 months, live and shipping
- Year
- 2026
The brief
- guests registered in six months
- 1,000+
- direct bookings in six months
- 2,800+
- restaurant reservations
- +120%
- spa reservations
- +150%
- day-pass bookings
- +400%
Against the season before launch.
Before it, these were sold by phone, email, WhatsApp and a notebook at the front desk.
Today a guest books from the airport lounge in Japanese, pays securely, saves the ticket to their Wallet, and reception sees it appear live on their calendar. No back-and-forth. No double bookings. No commission to a marketplace.
Sunset experiences, tables at Akau, spa rituals, day passes, sunbeds and transfers are all discoverable, bookable and payable in one flow. Three applications share one codebase and one database: the guest site in ten languages, an admin panel of about forty sections, and a partner portal on its own subdomain.
It was not specified in a meeting room and handed to an agency. It was built by us — the people who worked the floor, took the calls, answered the WhatsApp messages at midnight and ran the daily operations of the hotel for years.
The approach
Found everywhere
Travellers increasingly ask an assistant, not a search box. AI crawlers are welcomed by name, llms.txt gives language models accurate facts to quote, every page carries rich structured data — more than 25 schema.org types, with prices — and arrives as clean server-rendered HTML. Each of the ten languages is its own crawlable site, and IndexNow pings search engines the moment content changes.
Built to sell
Commission-free direct sales, open 24/7. Every experience and spa treatment has its own page with a photo gallery and video, so guests see exactly what the evening looks like before they book it. A side-by-side comparison pitches the premium tier before booking, and a guest who already booked can upgrade by paying only the difference. The Day Pass includes a Cave Spa hour. Sold-out days are struck through, not hidden, with a jump to the next available date and a fair first-to-book waitlist. Consent-based follow-ups, group-dining deposits and a partner network with tracked links and automatic commissions do the rest.
Guests who feel looked after
Calendars update in real time as others book: what a guest sees is what is left. In-house guests are recognised through the hotel PMS, unlocking resident-only experiences with no codes and no queue at the desk. Reschedule, cancel with an automatic refund, upgrade or add a transfer — all self-service. The ticket lands in Apple or Google Wallet, and the concierge answers in whatever language the guest writes in. It never invents a price or a policy.
Secure by design
Card data never touches our servers: payments run on Viva's hosted checkout, every notification is signature-verified, and confirmation is idempotent. Prices, totals and eligibility are recomputed from the database on every request, so a tampered browser cannot buy a cheaper ticket. Row-level security on every one of the 68 tables, capacity guarded by locks inside the database, access checked at four independent layers, passkeys for sign-in — and regular full security audits.
Built by operators
Every feature started as a problem we lived through.
- We took the double booking on the phoneso capacity is now guarded inside the database and cannot be oversold.
- We told guests “sorry, fully booked” and watched them leaveso there is a waitlist that writes to them the moment a place opens.
- We checked room lists by handso in-house guests are now recognised automatically through the PMS.
- We chased no-shows on large tablesso there is a group deposit and a clear hold policy.
- We arranged drivers over a chain of messagesso a transfer is now one page, one price and one email to reception.
- We answered the same ten questions in ten languagesso the concierge answers them, in the guest's language, at any hour.
- We started each morning rebuilding the day from inboxes and notebooksso staff now get a digest, a live calendar and a bell that rings when something is booked.
The rules in the code — who may book what, when a refund applies, how a day pass and its spa hour travel together — are the rules we enforced by hand for years. A problem seen on the floor in the morning is often fixed in production the same week.
Where competitors stop
Six things Experience does that competing booking platforms don’t.
No fee per reservation
Not a cent per booking, however many the hotel sells.
A waiting list
When an experience is full, guests join a waitlist and hear the moment a place opens.
Upselling emails
Emails that put the hotel’s other experiences in front of guests who have already booked.
Transfer upselling
Transfers are offered alongside whatever the guest books — one page, one price.
A loyalty database
Every guest and every booking builds the hotel’s own loyalty database — the guests stay the hotel’s, not the platform’s.
Unlimited calendars
One calendar for every experience, restaurant or service, with no cap on how many.
Homepage
Experience, with the reserve bar pinned
By the numbers
Code figures measured from the repository, 20 September 2026.Under the hood
- 10 languages, interface and content
- 68 database tables, row-level security on each
- 4,850 automated unit tests
- 11 scheduled jobs running the routine
- 3 full security audits in 2026
Result
In six months, more than 1,000 guests registered and more than 2,800 bookings came in direct. Against the season before launch, restaurant reservations rose 120%, spa reservations 150% and day passes 400%.
No back-and-forth. No double bookings. No commission to a marketplace. The storefront sells while reception sleeps, and the team starts the morning with a digest instead of an inbox. It is a fully custom product, live in production, built and hardened over nine and a half months by the people who run these operations every day.
- Stack
- Next.js
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