Park4Travels is not a client project. It is an airport parking comparison and booking platform we designed, built and still run ourselves, which is why this case study can tell you what each decision cost rather than what it was supposed to achieve.
What does Park4Travels actually do?
It compares airport parking across UK airports, shows live prices for the dates a traveller enters, takes the booking and the payment in one go, and then looks after the customer until they are home. Behind that sits the part nobody sees: inventory pulled from several suppliers, each with its own system, presented as one clean comparison.
What is it built with?
- Framework: Next.js, with pages rendered on the server so the page Google reads is the page a customer sees.
- Data: Prisma as the database layer.
- Payments: Stripe, with the booking confirmed from Stripe’s own notification rather than from the customer’s browser.
- Supply: live connections to several parking supplier systems, merged into one result set.
- Search: schema markup, XML sitemaps and a landing page per airport.
Why not build it on WordPress?
Live pricing. Every search asks several suppliers for prices at once, and WordPress is built to serve stored pages, not to merge live answers from outside systems in a fraction of a second. For a brochure site or a blog we still recommend WordPress; this is a site where the content changes with every search.
The hard parts
A slow supplier must never break the page. If one supplier takes too long or returns nothing, the comparison still renders with everyone else. Results are cached carefully, with one rule we learned the hard way: an empty result is never cached, or a brief outage turns into hours of blank pages.
A paid booking must never go missing. If a customer pays and then closes the tab before the confirmation page loads, the booking still has to exist. So the booking is created from Stripe’s payment notification, exactly once, whichever of the two arrives first. That is the sort of edge case you only take seriously after it happens to you.
The phone is the shop. People book airport parking on their phone, often the night before they fly, so the whole route from search to payment had to work with a thumb on a small screen.
What running it taught us
- Never cache an empty state.
- Instrument the money path, so a failed payment or booking shows up on a dashboard before a customer has to tell you.
- Measure which pages earn, because the pages that rank best are not always the ones that sell.
- Speed is a commercial feature, not a technical nicety.
What would a platform like this cost?
From £3,995 / $4,995. Booking platforms, online stores and anything with live supplier or payment integrations sit in our Premium tier, and the price is fixed before we start. If you need something simpler, a Business site with up to 15 pages and a CMS is £1,495 / $1,895.
Visit the live site: park4travels.co.uk. More on how we run it: the Park4Travels project page.
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