Quest Cottages required a scalable holiday rental platform capable of synchronising live property listings, availability calendars, and booking data from an external property management system.

The solution needed to provide fast search, accurate availability, and a seamless booking experience, while compensating for limitations in third-party APIs.

• Build a bespoke WordPress holiday lettings platform
• Integrate live listing data from a property management API
• Support real-time availability calendars
• Implement custom search and filtering
• Enable booking workflows with dynamic price calculation
• Ensure long-term maintainability despite vendor constraints

The site needed to behave like a rental platform, not a brochure site.

Rather than relying directly on external search capabilities, I designed a local data ingestion and caching layer.

Property data is:

• Pulled from the Hostaway API
• Normalised into structured WordPress models
• Cached locally for performance
• Queried via custom search logic

This allowed us to build flexible filtering by:

• Location
• Amenities
• Availability
• Property features

Independent of API search limitations.

Bookings are handled through a custom PHP/jQuery interface featuring:

• Interactive date selection
• Dynamic pricing calculation
• Server-side validation
• Availability checks
• Structured order handling

The system ensures pricing accuracy while maintaining a smooth frontend experience.

The platform originally integrated with Octorate, which required extensive workarounds due to evolving API capabilities.

The architecture was designed to abstract third-party data ingestion, allowing the client to migrate to Hostaway without rebuilding the entire frontend system.

This demonstrates resilience in platform design when working with external vendors whose APIs may change over time.

The build also marked a transition from older JSX-based templating to a structured ACF block system, improving:

• Editorial flexibility
• Layout consistency
• Long-term maintainability

The result is a scalable rental platform that balances third-party integration with independent control.

• Automated listing and availability synchronisation
• Improved search performance
• Flexible filtering beyond vendor limitations
• Vendor-agnostic data architecture
• Maintainable CMS structure

The project demonstrates complex API integration, caching strategy, booking logic, and platform resilience within WordPress.

Built while working as Lead Developer at Gold Pebble.
Design direction provided by the Gold Pebble team.
Architecture, API integration, and booking logic by Taran Stafford.