Our Booking Planner Refused 75% of Trips. The Fix Was the Data.

Luxe Excursions sells luxury tours, packages and rentals from a shop in Costa Adeje, Tenerife. We built its website, booking platform and staff CMS, and we run its SEO, Google Ads and Business Profile. The biggest gain didn’t come from new code. It came from checking the data the old booking planner trusted.

1. 01The planner that said no

   The first version tried to schedule every activity at booking time, using the timetables in the CMS and the size of the van fleet. The client called it too complex, so we measured it. Across every 3-activity combination on a 3-day stay, the planner refused 75% of itineraries.

   All 164 refusals came from weekday data in the CMS. None came from van capacity. When we checked the partner venues against their own websites, 3 of 4 timetables were wrong. One show was blocked on two of its three real nights.

2. 02Pay first, schedule after

   We changed how bookings work. Guests now choose their activities and pay, and staff assign every date and time afterwards. Only one thing can refuse a booking: an activity that never runs during the guest’s stay. Capacity clashes become notes for staff, never an error for the guest. Tickets hide times until a member of staff has approved the schedule. After the data was corrected, the refusal rate went to 0%.

3. 03Staff hear about every sale

   At launch, only the guest got an email when they booked. Now the team gets one for every paid booking and every trip request, with the guest set as reply-to so staff can answer straight away. Each alert goes out once per booking, so a payment retry never sends a duplicate.

4. 04Reviews without cherry-picking

   Reviews decide how a local business shows up on the map, so we automated the ask. Every guest gets one email at 10:00 local time the day after their last activity, within a week of the trip. Nobody gets it twice, and test or agency bookings are left out.

   We ask every guest, whatever we think of how the trip went, because Google forbids asking only happy customers. Guests who book in the shop or by WhatsApp get the same message by hand, and a QR card on the counter.

5. 05Fully booked without disappearing

   Sometimes an item has to stop selling for a while, like the e-bike rental while its paperwork was pending. Deleting the page would throw away its search ranking. Instead, staff tick “Fully booked” in the admin. The page stays live, it can’t be bought, and Google is told it’s sold out.

6. 06A giveaway that is fair, and works on a phone

   The “Win a Tenerife getaway” page takes one entry per email, through the website or Instagram. The draw picks a winner and two reserves from a recorded random seed, so the draw can be re-run later and checked. We left out “share to enter”, because Meta’s rules don’t allow it.

   In its first six days, 269 people entered on the website. Then the data showed that half of all attempts were failing, mostly because the Instagram username was left blank and phones gave no clear sign why. The form now jumps to the field that needs fixing. In the first two hours after the change, 14 entries went through and none failed. Instagram followers grew from 25 to 190 that week.

7. 07Getting Google right

   A guest followed the map to the wrong street: the Business Profile pin was about 460 m from the shop. We corrected the address and pin on Google, the website and Facebook.

   Google Analytics now tracks bookings, trip requests and WhatsApp clicks, and Google Ads learns from bookings and WhatsApp clicks. Every activity has a Book Now button on its first screen, and the payment form loads only when someone pays, so pages are faster on phones. Google’s own SEO check scores the site 100, and the main image shows in 1.3 seconds on a phone.

8. 08What it runs on

   The backend runs on Django and Django REST Framework, and the website on Next.js. Data lives in PostgreSQL, hosting is on AWS (ECS Fargate and Amplify), Stripe takes payments and Brevo sends email.