Zara Booking Manager
A booking engine and staff PWA for a convention centre — one source of truth for who has the hall, and when.
A convention centre sells the same room to different people on different days, in fixed slots. Get that wrong once and you have two weddings arriving at the same address.
This is the system that stops that happening — a booking API and a staff-facing progressive web app, built on top of the venue’s WooCommerce checkout.
What it does
- Three fixed slots — morning (7:00 AM – 3:30 PM), evening (4:00 PM – 10:00 PM), or the full day
- One availability truth — online orders, walk-in bookings and manually blocked dates all write to the same calendar, so a slot sold at the counter disappears from the website
- Walk-in entry — staff can take a booking on the phone without going through checkout
- Calendar and alerts — month view, day detail, and cancellation handling
- Installable PWA — runs from the home screen, with the interface built around what a phone browser will actually allow
The part that mattered
Slot values arriving from the checkout were being sanitised into a corrupted key, which meant a date could silently fail to block and the same slot could be sold twice. The rewrite recognises a slot by its start time rather than by an exact string, so the booking form can be reworded without breaking availability — and anything unrecognised is treated as a hard error rather than being stored and forgotten.
