Boatscribe — price aggregator for catamaran, motorboat and yacht rental

Finding the right yacht for your holiday has always been a difficult task. That's why our client had the idea to create a project, namely a website for comparing yacht charter prices, where customers can simply enter their parameters and get all the information they need from numerous sources. That's how he came up with Boatscribe, an effective price aggregator for renting catamarans, motor boats, and yachts, and decided to entrust us with the web development of this project.

Client

Boatscribe team set out to create a unique startup price aggregator for boat charter services, online agents, and yacht charter companies in one place. The concept of this project was unique not only in Europe, but also globally, making it one of a kind in the yacht charter markets.

Our client’s mission was to collect information on yacht availability from various sources and make this information available to all users so that they could see a large number of online yachts and boat charter prices on one platform.

Task

Our team was tasked with developing a startup price aggregator for boat, catamaran, motorboat and yacht hire. We wanted to help our client collect all available yacht charter offers in one place, allowing users to compare prices and choose the most relevant offer for them.

Thus, we were tasked with creating the best price comparison aggregator in the boat and yacht rental market.

Solution

The decision was made to create a user-friendly online platform that allows users to obtain complete information about yachts and boats from various websites and sellers, compare prices, and present the final results of their analysis. This approach greatly simplifies the search, as it eliminates the need to open numerous web pages at the same time.

Boatscribe is a unique product in the boat rental market, as there is currently no other platform that brings together multiple suppliers and collects comprehensive information for the end customer. The platform’s system has already analysed more than 35,000 offers and has developed the ability to target and combine them according to individual user preferences.

Process

Work on the project began with a detailed technical specification, after which we held a brainstorming session with the client. Then Solar Digital started looking for ideas for this project.

After analyzing the market and putting everything together, the team moved on to the first stage — design. Interestingly, it was adopted from the first iteration, as we had experience working with the yacht charter company Sailica, which helped us implement all the best practices we had used before. Two specialists took part in the design development — a UI/UX designer and an art director.

Further development was carried out using the Agile methodology in sprints with constant communication with the client. During the development process, all functionalities were tested. The project was created using Laravel and Vue. js technologies. In addition, we used

• interaction with the Rest API system
• Doctrine 2 object-relational projector
• mysql 5.7 database
• ElasticSearch 7.9 offers storage system
• Redis 5 data storage server
• PHP 8.1 language.
  

This list was developed at the request of the client, which allows us to solve all business problems. We also implemented several integrations to import the necessary data from various sources. Backend and frontend specialists worked on the development. A quality control engineer and a project manager joined the process from time to time.

Such a complex project was implemented in a record three months thanks to the existing experience of our team members who were involved in previous projects.

Result

Even though the main technical part is ready, the addition of additional features to Boatscribe is ongoing. There are also plans to expand its reach by translating it into several languages and developing a mobile app.

It is worth noting that BoatScribe is a start-up with limited resources. Using our knowledge and experience as experienced professionals in the yacht and boat rental industry, our company Solar Digital continues to advise the client. We help optimize processes by providing suggestions for improving the product itself.