Awesome Caribbean Villas

About AWESOME CARIBBEAN VILLAS

The team of ACV loves travelling and wanted to make finding and booking a villa, super convenient and fun for all travelers. They wanted an app that would help customers find their perfect Awesome Caribbean Villa quickly, so they could spend less time searching for a villa, and more time enjoying it. The web application has some amazing features including satellite views and instant quotes with full rate breakdowns and easy-to-use filters.

Requirement

The client began visiting the Caribbean years ago and fell in love with the islands. They felt that there's nothing like the crystal-clear waters, incredible people and fun-filled vibe of the Caribbean.

The client bought their first villa on Turks & Caicos in 2015, put it on the rental market and occasionally escaped down from San Francisco themselves, to enjoy it when it wasn’t taken. That’s when they decided to start Awesome Caribbean Villas, so they could help others come to the Caribbean just as easily, and make their holiday the best vacation they ever had. The client, having worked with us before, came to us with the core requirement, which was to provide the admin an efficient way to add villas, manage amenities and confirm bookings and cancellations. Also, they wanted a way to involve villa owners for approval in offline mode. The most crucial part however, was to create an easy and attractive interface for the users to browse through a range of villas, get enough detail to make the right choice and book their favorite villa within minutes.

Challenge

The first thing that had to be done was to study similar web applications available in market, observe their strengths and identify any weaknesses that could be improved upon.
One of the challenges was that the client already had the wireframe and designs developed from their end. As a result, we had to work within strict confines and implement new ideas on an existing wireframe.
The biggest challenge by far, was the collection and management of an enormous amount of data. The client was very particular about a solid database of accurate, real-time configuration of each villa like bedrooms, pools, number of beds, indoor amenities, outdoor amenities, kitchens and a score of other details.
Another tricky part was to manage payment calculations for bookings, revised bookings, cancellations, refund, commission and others in the backend and hiding the complexity from the end users.
Client was looking for a robust and dynamic system. They wanted the email templates to be designed in a dynamic manner such that the email content would change real time based on payment calculations when sending the approval/rejection/reminder emails to customers.

Solution

Through a series of in-person meetings, we gained a thorough understanding of product usage expectations. We took the time to envision how the product will be used by the average user and created some prototypes.
We carefully analyzed the design and requirement of the application. To ensure a proper flow, we held meetings with client to discuss the changes required in design in order. Also, we suggested a few inputs to improve the UI and UX. Client agreed with our feedback and had the design changes made accordingly.
The client had a long list of villas to be entered and wanted to have it all entered right at the development stage. So, we set different database accesses, giving the client access within the development mode. This way, they could use the same database in production once we went live.
We created a dynamic backend where client could enter and manage all configuration run time. We made sure we had all the configurations in the system for admin to add run time.
The client’s payment logic which was very complex in nature. It involved manual, admin as well user inputs from time to time. Development team came up with a solution that allows customers to easily pay their installments without having to know the complexity of calculations going in the backend.
Our development team ensured that the complexity of our dynamic email templates and payments did not interfere with its ease of use.

Technologies

Summing Up

Planning a trip to the Caribbean should be a zero-stress event and the Awesome Caribbean Villas app helps make it just that. Working on this app was a wonderful experience for us at Moveo Apps. We loved incorporating rich graphics and satellite views of stunning villas just as much as we enjoyed working on the complex logic and data, when creating this app. The app has been as delightful for the client and the users as it has been for us.

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