Flight Catchers UK — a custom Laravel flight-booking site & CRM

We built Flight Catchers' booking platform in a week and a half — a custom Laravel flight-booking site for a UK travel agent, with multi-airport search, fare deals, city-break and holiday packages and a Fly & Earn rewards programme, plus a CRM in the same application that captures and works every enquiry the site produces. It is live at flightcatchersuk.co.uk, handed over in full and run by the client.

Client

Flight Catchers UK · UK

Industry

Travel · Flights

Engagement

1.5-week build

Team

2 Laravel engineers · 1 designer

flightcatchersuk.co.uk

Flight Catchers UK — a custom Laravel flight-booking site & CRM

The brief

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

Flight Catchers UK needed a booking site, and they needed it in a week and a half. That deadline is the whole shape of this project, and it is worth being straight about what it rules out: there was no room for a bespoke design system, no room for a custom booking engine written from nothing, and no room for a discovery phase that produced a document instead of a website.

What it did not rule out was getting the hard parts right. British travellers do not depart from one airport — a Manchester family and a Gatwick family are shopping the same holiday from different runways — so search that assumes a single origin loses half the enquiries before they start. And an agent selling city breaks and packages alongside bare flights is running a merchandising problem, not just a search problem: the customer who has not chosen a destination is worth more than the one who has, and they need something to browse.

Underneath both sat the same gap Royal Travel had. Enquiries were arriving with nowhere to live, which meant the ones that were not answered the same day were effectively lost.

The build

We shipped a custom Laravel site in ten days. Multi-airport search across departure points, fare deals surfaced as their own pages, city-break and holiday packages as a browsable range rather than a form to fill in, and a Fly & Earn rewards programme for repeat travellers — the mechanism an independent agent has that an aggregator does not.

The CRM is built into the same application. Every enquiry the front end produces lands as a record, and the team moves it from first contact through to booked in one place, with one login. Same architecture as Royal Travel and the same reason for it: the seam between a website and a separate lead system is where enquiries go missing, so there is no seam.

Hitting ten days was a scoping decision, not a heroic one. Laravel with Blade and Bootstrap on a MySQL database is deliberately unfashionable, and it is what makes a schedule like this real — no build pipeline to fight, no framework migration mid-project, and a stack any competent PHP developer can pick up when we are gone. The parts that genuinely needed thought got it; the parts that did not were assembled from things that already work.

The site has since carried a 4.5-star Trustpilot rating for the business, and the repository, hosting and domain sit in the client's name.

Architecture