Vacation Rental Booking Site

Vacation rental website built for a freelance client to enable guests to book directly with host and reduce middleman fees.

Built with:

Gatsby.js
React
Styled Components
Netlify
Sanity.io

Highlights

  • Gatsby.js site with Sanity.io CMS built for a freelance client to promote their waterfront vacation rental property
  • Integration with OwnerRez enables guests to book directly with host and reduces middleman fees for my freelance client

Tech Stack

I chose to use Gatsby.js for this project as the site's content would be fairly static except for the booking widget. As one of the most popular JAMstack frameworks, Gatsby makes sites blazing fast by default, integrates well with a variety of CMSs, and enables very low cost static deployments. I chose to use Sanity.io for my project's headless CMS because of it's generous free tier for developers, highly configurable CMS, and amazing overall developer experience. With this stack I was able to build the entire site with React and have a customized headless CMS that non-technical users could use to add and update content on the site and trigger new deploys.

Booking

While booking platforms like Airbnb and HomeAway are great for customer discovery, they take a large cut from hosts and limit the control that hosts have over their interaction with customers.

With visiteggharbor.com, having a dedicated site enabled my client's guests to book directly with them and dramatically reduce middleman fees.

My client wished to use OwnerRez, a vacation rental management platform that handles guest bookings and payments and syncs with other rental platforms like Airbnb and HomeAway. OwnerRez provides a variety of Javascript booking widgets intended for embedding in a wordpress site, and I was able to embed these in this project after a bit configuration on my end.

Deployment

I used Netlify to deploy the Gatsby site and the Sanity studio to production. The beauty of using a JAMstack framework like this is that both the Gatsby site and the studio are built as static files and then can be deployed on a global CDN for a very low cost on platforms like Netlify. In addition, Netlify build hooks are setup to allow a redeployment of the site to be triggered from within the Sanity studio interface.