Overview
168 Apartments is a custom short-let booking platform built to handle apartment availability, reservations, payments, and day-to-day property management. The frontend was separated from WordPress and connected to a custom WordPress booking engine through REST APIs.
The Problem
168 Apartments needed more than a website for displaying available apartments. The system needed to handle the actual booking process and give the admin a way to manage the property from one place. That meant checking availability, creating bookings, managing rooms, blocking dates, handling payment confirmation, and keeping track of guests and reviews. The challenge was building those workflows into one system instead of relying on disconnected tools.
Approach
I built a custom booking engine inside WordPress and exposed the functionality through a REST API. The frontend could communicate with the backend through dedicated endpoints while the WordPress side handled the booking logic and management operations. This gave us a clear separation between the customer-facing application and the booking system behind it.
Development
The booking engine covered both the guest experience and the admin side of the platform. Booking Guests could check apartment availability and create bookings through the API. Payment verification was also built into the booking flow. Property Management The admin system included room creation, editing, activation and deactivation, image management, amenities, and manual date blocking. Booking Management Admins could view individual or multiple bookings, filter bookings, update booking status, confirm payments, and view dashboard statistics. Reviews and Inquiries The platform also included guest inquiries and a review system where admins could approve or reject reviews, respond to them, and view overall review summaries.
Challenges & Fixes
The biggest challenge was making the booking system handle more than simply creating reservations. Availability, blocked dates, room status, payment confirmation, and booking status all affect whether a reservation can proceed. Instead of treating these as separate features, the backend was structured around dedicated API operations for each part of the workflow. That also made the admin side much easier to build because the frontend could interact with specific endpoints for rooms, bookings, blocks, reviews, inquiries, and dashboard data.
Outcome
168 Apartments became a custom booking and property management system rather than a standard apartment website. The platform brought booking, availability, property management, payment confirmation, guest inquiries, reviews, and administrative reporting into one system, with the frontend and backend communicating through a custom REST API.
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