Case study
Luminous.
A rental management brand, with direct booking and the dashboards that run it.
- Role
- Design & engineering
- Type
- Website · Direct booking · Dashboards
- Timeline
- 2026
- Stack
- Next.js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, Prisma, Neon Postgres, Stripe, Hostaway API, Netlify, Turborepo
- Live
- Visit site ↗
Luminous manages short-term rentals for property owners in Canada, the US and the Caribbean. I built the whole platform: a marketing site engineered for search, a direct booking engine connected to Hostaway and Stripe, a dashboard for owners and an admin console for the team. It's built to keep running costs low and to scale piece by piece, when the business says it's worth it.
Built to be found
Every page sets its own canonical URL, Open Graph and social tags, and carries structured data: Organization, FAQ, breadcrumbs and blog posts, plus a LodgingBusiness record for every rental with its address, location, price and rating. The sitemap is generated from the live listings, and test listings and private pages stay out of the index.
Direct booking, no double bookings
Guests search by location, bedrooms, guests and dates, then get a live quote with cleaning fees, extra-guest charges and each listing's own tax rules, shown in their currency and charged in CAD. Availability combines the Hostaway calendar, synced reservations and the site's own bookings in progress, so a night can't be sold twice.
Payments that stay in sync
Checkout re-prices on the server, then holds the dates for 15 minutes inside a database transaction while Stripe takes the payment. If two guests reach for the same nights, the second payment is cancelled before it is charged. Once Stripe confirms, the reservation is created in Hostaway, the payment recorded against it and the confirmation sent exactly once; a sweep every ten minutes finishes anything that stalled.
A dashboard for owners
Owners sign in to see their own properties only: revenue by month, channel and property, occupancy, upcoming stays and reviews. They block dates for their own trips in a couple of taps (written straight back to Hostaway) and download clear monthly statements.
One console for the team
The admin console runs the business: bookings, finance reports and owner statements, owners, listing edits pushed to Hostaway, and the blog, case studies and testimonials, with AI-assisted drafting. Every change is logged and refreshes the public site immediately.
Lean to run, ready to scale
Every part was sized for today's traffic, not for a guess about next year. Pages read from a Postgres copy of Hostaway, so a page view never waits on a third-party API; webhooks and small scheduled jobs keep that copy fresh. Hosting, database and sync are separate pieces, so each can be upgraded on its own when traffic makes it worth it.
Shipped together
The work ran in close collaboration with the Luminous team. We went through several rounds of QA and feedback before launch, covering pricing, turnover days, minimum stays and every step of the booking flow, so it went live tight.
