I am interested in learning how to create a hotel booking app. I want to create the booking calendar functionality from scratch. Any advice on what I can read or watch to get started?
Thanks!
Hey Brad,
Do you have a live example of what you’re looking to do? There’s quite a lot of different designs for this sort of feature so I’m curious as to what you’re design would look like.
I worked on a restaurant reservation application before and at the core of thing, it’s calendar which it’s main purpose is to collect the dates and time, and then these dates are passed to some sort of booking logic. What I worked on was two seperate components, the frontend UI (calendar) and the backend logic.
I recommend breaking these into to parts - the frontend and then backend. Start off looking at something like https://litepicker.com/ or react-calendar - npm for React. It’s not recommend making the actual calendar from scratch since that is such a pain! The teams I’ve been on have always leverages libraries and customized it from there.
Once you have a working calendar that can pick dates you can then move into the logic code. You might even use something like https://demand.developers.booking.com/ to do the heavy lifting if you want to make a really scalable app. Or you can just use your own database.
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Thank you Roku, I appreciate your help! I want to specialize in creating booking websites for hotels, lodges and resorts so I’m looking to be as knowledgeable as I can be in those areas. I don’t have any one booking system in mind. I like the functionality on this sites calendar: - SecretRetreats
Thank you so much for your recommendations… I’ll take a look at those asap!
This might be more suited for you actually https://air-datepicker.com/examples. It’s a lightweight flexible date picker that’s purely JavaScript.
If you want to replicate the date picker in SecretRetreats, you could manually design this date picker box then use the date picker library when users click on CHECK IN and CHECK OUT to bring up a calendar (so you don’t have to design it). When the user clicks on a date on the picker, push that data into the CHECK IN value, and same with CHECK OUT.
For the number of nights, you could create something like this Let's build a passenger counter app!. SecretRetreats uses a pop-up modal for this so maybe you can build what is taught in the passenger app lessons and make a mini version to pop up in a modal too. Put a confirm button somewhere in this modal and then push this value into the Night(s) value once the user selects a number.
This number of people section isn’t too complicated I think. You can just use a HTML dropdown for this like this: HTML Drop-down Menu – How to Add a Drop-Down List with the Select Element
I think that encapsulates most things in terms of data collection from the hotel guests. The next step would then submit the collected data and filter for rooms to show. That’s a whole other field of things so have a look at doing these data collection element first and let us know how things go!
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This is great ! Thank you again! I’ll definitely share how it goes when I get a chance to put something together.
Much appreciated 
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Good luck! Excited to see how you go!