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// serviced accommodation

Ideal Escapes – Hampshire stays, booked direct

Serviced accommodation across Hampshire. Search by dates, pay by card on the site itself, and calendars that stay in step with Airbnb and Booking.com.

Industry
Serviced accommodation
Type
Booking and payment website
Scope
Design and development
Year
2026
Ideal Escapes – Hampshire stays, booked direct
// the brief

What the site had to do

The brief

Ideal Escapes lets serviced accommodation across Hampshire – houses and apartments prepared to hotel standards, for a night, a week or a month. The website has two jobs at once: to sell the nights directly, with no platform fee, and to speak to the landlords and letting agents who might hand a property over. All of it under the UK rules on showing the full price from the first screen, on a clear cancellation deadline and on publishing the company details.

What we built

The site runs on our own PHP and MySQL panel, and the whole booking happens inside it: search by location, dates and guests → the property page with gallery, amenities, house rules and an availability calendar → a three-step checkout paid by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay through Stripe.

The dates are held for twenty minutes while the guest fills in their details, and every amount is kept in pence rather than as a decimal. Each listing swaps iCal calendars with Airbnb and Booking.com so the same night is never sold twice. The landlord pages carry a calculator that estimates income from a postcode and a number of bedrooms, from a rate table in the panel rather than an outside service.

// the reasoning

What we chose and why

  1. The booking finishes on the site

    Location, dates, guests → the property → payment by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay through Stripe, with 3-D Secure. The dates are held for twenty minutes while the guest fills in their details.

  2. The calendars never drift apart

    Every listing publishes its own .ics for Airbnb and Booking.com and reads theirs every fifteen minutes. On an internal error the export returns an error. An empty feed would release every night at once, so the site doesn’t send one.

  3. The cancellation deadline is frozen into the booking

    Free cancellation until 48 hours before check-in. The number is a setting in the panel, but every booking keeps the deadline it was sold with, and the guest cancels from their own account.

  4. A second audience: property owners

    Three pages cover guaranteed rent, full management and an offer for letting agents. They carry a calculator that estimates income from a postcode and a number of bedrooms.

// what it includes

What the website includes

an opening screen with search by location, dates and guests

search results with filters, sorting and an empty state suggesting nearby towns

a page per property with gallery, amenities, rules, calendar and an area map

a three-step checkout with card, Apple Pay and Google Pay through Stripe

a guest account with bookings, self-service cancellation and a one-time sign-in link

three pages for landlords and agents with an income calculator

seven legal pages for the UK requirements and a cookie banner

iCal synchronisation with Airbnb and Booking.com

Palette
  • Orange #F35218
  • Ink #192024
  • Grey canvas #E7ECEF

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