Lanzarote Villa Choice

The Brief Trapped on a platform that didn't fit

The Digital States came to us in 2016 with a straightforward but frustrating problem: their client Lanzarote Villa Choice were trapped on a white label villa booking platform that restricted their functionality, couldn't offer full SSL encryption as standard, and gave them no room to grow. The brief was to migrate them to a fully owned, custom-built WordPress solution — one that gave them complete control over their listings, bookings, and customer experience.

The Challenge More than a booking form bolted on

The client needed more than a content site with a booking form bolted on. They needed a proper booking engine: one that understood seasonal pricing, handled availability checking, processed deposits, managed multi-step enquiries, and kept the admin informed at every stage. All of this needed to work reliably for a small business owner with no technical background, in a competitive holiday rental market where trust and ease of booking are everything.

An additional complexity was channel management. The client listed properties across multiple platforms, and any booking system that operated in isolation risked double-bookings — a serious problem in the villa rental market. The solution needed to stay in sync with external platforms automatically.

What We Built A booking engine built from scratch

• A custom WordPress plugin housing a complete booking engine, built on a bespoke Divi child theme
• A villa custom post type giving the client structured control over their entire property inventory from the WordPress admin
• Per-villa configuration for seasonal pricing rates, mandatory and optional additional fees, and deposit payment settings — all manageable without touching code
• A front-end search engine allowing visitors to filter by check-in/out dates, area, number of guests, and property name — driven by live availability data
• A per-villa availability calendar on each property detail page, colour-coded to show available dates, check-in days, check-out days, and blocked or booked periods
• A full enquiry and booking flow covering availability check, enquiry submission, deposit payment processing, and confirmation
• A complete automated email system sending booking requests, payment reminders, and confirmations to both customer and admin
• An iCal-based calendar sync pulling external bookings from third-party platforms such as Airbnb and Booking.com directly into the reservations system, preventing double-bookings across channels

Behind The Scenes A reservations system built for the real world

Behind the scenes, the plugin added a dedicated Reservations section to the WordPress dashboard. Admins could view all bookings as a filterable tabular list — filterable by accommodation, area, status, and number of guests — or switch to a fully interactive React-based calendar showing every reservation across all villas simultaneously. Bookings were colour-coded by status (confirmed, blocked, cancelled) and the calendar was horizontally scrollable across the full date range, giving the client a clear operational view of their entire inventory at a glance.

A "Sync Calendars" function pulled in external bookings from third-party platforms via iCal, ensuring that any reservations made through Airbnb, Booking.com, or similar channels were automatically reflected in the system — eliminating the risk of double-bookings across platforms. In effect, the plugin acted as a lightweight channel manager, centralising all reservation data regardless of where the booking originated.

The admin could also block accommodation and create new reservations manually directly from the calendar view, without leaving the dashboard.

A fully traversable reservations calendar and management system

Nine Years and Counting Still live. Still trading.

The site launched in 2016 and is still live and actively trading today — a testament to the solidity of the build and the client's continued trust in the platform. In an industry where white label solutions come and go, a bespoke build that's still performing nearly a decade later speaks for itself.