Royal Travel UK — a custom Laravel flight-booking site & CRM

We built Royal Travel's booking platform — a custom Laravel flight-booking site for a UK travel agent, with one-way and return search across economy and business, passenger selection, route deals and published fares, and online payments. Behind it sits a CRM built into the same application, where every enquiry the site produces is worked from first contact through to booked. The business has since moved domains: the platform we built now runs as Travel Republic at travelrepublicuk.com.

Client

Royal Travel UK · UK

Industry

Travel · Flights

Team

2 Laravel engineers · 1 designer

Live site

travelrepublicuk.com ↗

travelrepublicuk.com

Royal Travel UK — a custom Laravel flight-booking site & CRM

The brief

A UK travel agent needed flight search and deals out front — and a CRM to manage every enquiry behind it.

Royal Travel UK sells flights the way most independent British agents do: on fare access and on service, not on out-searching a metasearch engine. What they did not have was a front door of their own. Enquiries arrived by phone, by email and through third-party listings, each landing somewhere different, and none of them in anything that could say which had been quoted, which had been chased and which had quietly gone cold.

So the brief was really two products that usually get bought separately. Out front it needed to behave like a booking site — one-way and return search, cabin class, passenger counts, and the route deals an independent agent actually competes on — because a traveller who cannot see a fare does not send an enquiry in the first place. Behind it, every one of those searches had to land as a record a person could work, rather than as another notification to lose. Two systems bolted together would have met the brief on paper and failed in practice, because the handover between them is exactly where enquiries go missing.

The build

The public site is server-rendered Laravel — Blade templates with MySQL behind them — rather than a JavaScript application that arrives empty and fills itself in. On a mid-range phone that is the difference between a fare appearing and a visitor leaving, and it means the deals pages are readable by a crawler rather than invisible to one.

A traveller picks one-way or return, chooses economy or business, sets how many passengers are travelling, and searches. Route deals and published fares sit alongside the search as their own browsable surface, which is where an independent agent's margin actually lives: the traveller who has not yet decided where to go is precisely the one a metasearch engine never captures. Online payments are handled inside the same platform instead of handing the customer off mid-journey to somewhere that looks like a different company.

The CRM is part of that application, not a second system beside it. Every enquiry the front end generates becomes a record with its own state, and the team works it from first contact through to booked — so a quote nobody has chased is visible as a quote nobody has chased, rather than as an email three screens down someone's inbox. One codebase, one database, one login. For a team this size that is the whole difference between a system they use and a system they go back to working around.

Built by two Laravel engineers and a designer, and handed over with the repository, the hosting and the domain in the client's own name. The client has since moved it to a new domain, travelrepublicuk.com, where it trades as Travel Republic on the same platform.

Architecture