Hidayah Properties
Direct booking for a boutique serviced-let
About Hidayah Properties
Hidayah Properties is a Birmingham serviced-accommodation operator. Its flagship is Sage House, a one-bedroom apartment in Chinatown that sleeps four, and it also manages short-let properties for landlords, estate agents and homeowners. It is the kind of small, design-led host that competes with hotels and the booking platforms on experience, and needs a direct channel to keep the margin those platforms take on every stay.
Objectives
- Take bookings for Sage House directly, on live availability, without paying platform commission on every stay.
- Serve availability instantly, without calling the booking platform on every page load.
- Give guests a self-serve welcome guide: directions, access, check-in times and a line to the host.
- Give property owners a way in, an enquiry routed by whether they are a landlord, an estate agent or a homeowner.
- Keep the site fast and easy to find, with content the team can publish itself.
The Challenge
A boutique host makes its margin on direct bookings, but the availability truth lives in the booking platform it manages the let through. Calling that platform on every page load is slow, rate-limited, and would put its API key in the browser, and leaning on the big listing sites for every booking hands over a cut of each stay. Hidayah needed a site that felt instant, showed availability a guest could trust, and took the booking directly, rather than becoming a thin front end for someone else's API.
The Approach
The core decision was to treat the booking platform as a source to mirror, not a service to call. Rather than query Lodgify live on every visit, a scheduled job copies its properties, rooms and availability into the site's own database and precomputes a day-by-day availability table, so the calendar a guest browses is read instantly from Postgres rather than fetched on the fly. The few calls that do need to be live go through a server-side proxy that keeps the API key off the client. The alternative, hitting the platform's API on every request, was rejected: it is slower, throttled, and exposes the key for a page most visitors only scroll.
The Solution
Guests land on Sage House, check their dates against live availability and book direct at rates with no platform fee, with a downloadable welcome guide that covers access, check-in and how to reach the host. Property owners get their own path: an enquiry routed by whether they are a landlord, an estate agent or a homeowner. The content that changes, the blog and the property details, is editable by the team, and the whole site is built to load fast and be found.
Built as a React and Vite site on Vercel, with Supabase (Postgres) as the read model the pages actually query. A daily Vercel cron syncs the Lodgify booking platform into Supabase, including a precomputed daily availability table, so a page load never waits on the platform's API, and a server-side proxy fronts the live calls so the Lodgify key stays out of the browser. The blog runs on Strapi so the team publishes without a deploy, enquiries post through a serverless function that emails the host, and per-page metadata keeps the small site easy to find.
Book Sage House direct, on live availability
Sage House shows dates a guest can actually take, and books them directly at the host's own rates, with no platform service fee on top. The availability the calendar shows is read from the site's own database rather than fetched from the booking platform on every visit, so it loads instantly, and the exact dates are confirmed live before payment. The listing is on the big sites too; this site's job is to be the cheaper, nicer way to book the same stay.
- Live availability, direct rates, no platform booking fee
- The calendar loads from the site's own database, not a per-visit API call
- Exact dates confirmed live at checkout
Reading availability from a nightly mirror is what makes the page instant, and also its cost: the at-a-glance calendar is only as current as the last sync, so it can lag the platform by up to a day. The exact dates are re-checked live before anyone pays, so the trade is a browsable calendar that is fast and close, backed by a booking step that is exact.
A welcome guide that answers the questions for you
Every guest gets the same page: the address and how to get in, check-in and check-out times, the Wi-Fi, and a direct line to the host, with the full illustrated guide downloadable as a PDF. The questions a host otherwise answers by message ten times a week are answered once, on a page the guest keeps, so arriving is self-serve without feeling unhosted.
- Directions, access, check-in and check-out on one page
- Host contact a tap away, plus a downloadable PDF guide
- The same answers every time, without a message thread
The same operator, from the owner's side
Hidayah also runs other people's properties, so the site has a second front door. A short flow asks whether you are a landlord, an estate agent or a homeowner and routes the enquiry accordingly, turning a management pitch into a qualified lead in the inbox rather than a generic contact form. One site sells the stay to guests and the service to owners, without splitting into two.
- A management arm for landlords, estate agents and homeowners
- The enquiry routes by who is asking
- Guests and owners served from one site
Technologies
Conclusion
Hidayah Properties now has a site that earns its bookings directly: guests book Sage House on availability they can trust, at rates the platforms do not take a cut of, and owners have a clear way to hand over a property. Because the booking engine is mirrored into a database the site owns, the pages stay fast and the host keeps the margin, and the same site is ready to carry the next property as easily as the first.
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