Booking engines built by someone who has shipped one.
Flight, hotel, tour and appointment booking — with real-time search, payments that hold and release correctly, refunds, supplier and GDS integration, and an admin panel your team can actually run. Not a template, and not a first attempt: a live multi-GDS platform already runs in production. Remote, worldwide.
Any reservation flow, engineered properly.
A booking engine is an integration problem wearing a website — the screens are the easy part. Here's the kind of system I build, with the hard parts done right.
Flight & hotel booking (GDS)
Live search and booking across GDS providers like Amadeus, Sabre and Travelport, plus direct supplier feeds — the exact system I've already built and maintain.
Aggregation platforms
One search across several suppliers, normalised into a single result — deduped, sorted, with failover when a supplier is slow or down.
Tours & activities
Availability calendars, time slots, capacity limits and seasonal pricing for tour operators and experience providers.
Hotel & property reservations
Room-type availability, rate plans, date-range logic and overbooking protection for hotels, rentals and property managers.
Appointment & service booking
Slot-based scheduling with staff, resources and calendars — for clinics, salons, rentals and any business that books time.
Travel agent & sub-agent portals
Back-office booking with per-agent markup, credit limits, roles and reporting — the operations layer behind a travel business. Reporting & dashboards →
What every booking engine includes
The parts nobody demos are the parts that matter. Every build ships with the hard, unglamorous pieces that make a booking correct, paid for, and honoured.
- Real-time availability search & fan-out
- Price-hold, payment & booking confirmation logic
- The payment-succeeded-but-booking-failed safety net
- Cancellations, changes & partial refunds
- Markup / commission & multi-currency rules
- Supplier failover & retry handling
- Admin panel for bookings, refunds & audit logs
- Confirmation emails & a clean money trail
Why hire someone who's already built one?
Booking engines are where generic developers get expensive — they discover the edge cases live, after launch, at your cost. I've already met them:
- A real multi-GDS platform in production, built solo front to back
- I know where prices drift between search and book
- I've handled the failed-booking / successful-payment case
- I design the refund and cancellation flows up front, not later
- Built to add suppliers later without a rewrite
- You own all the code — no lock-in
From suppliers to live bookings, in five steps.
Scope
Which suppliers, which markets, which currencies. We name what's in — and what isn't — so the quote is honest.
Design
The search flow, the money flow and the data model — agreed before a line of code, because this is where cost hides.
Integrate
Connect suppliers, normalise their data, and build search, booking and payment with previews as we go.
Test the edge cases
Price drift, timeouts, failed payments, refunds and supplier outages — not just the happy path.
Launch & support
Deploy, monitor real bookings, and stay on to add suppliers and features as you grow.
The thinking behind the build.
Write-ups that show how I approach booking engines — which GDS to start with, the architecture, and the honest cost.
Sabre vs Amadeus vs Travelport
Which GDS fits your market, which is biggest, and how GDS fees really work — with a quick verdict table to build your shortlist.
Integrating multiple GDS providers
How one engine talks to Amadeus, Sabre, Travelport and direct feeds at once — normalisation, fan-out search, price drift, failover and refunds.
What does it cost to build one?
The levers that actually set the price — suppliers, search, money movement and the edge cases — so you can size your own build.
Questions people ask about booking engines
Can I start with one supplier and add more later?
What stops the same seat or room being sold twice?
Do you build the customer-facing site as well as the engine?
What does a booking engine actually cost?
Planning a booking engine?
Tell me what you want people to book and which suppliers you need — a rough idea is enough. You'll get an honest scope and a clear quote, with no pressure.