Travel marketplace
StayNest Booking Marketplace
Host onboarding, property quality review, availability calendars, booking payments, cancellation rules, reviews, and support workflows for a short-stay marketplace.
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Measured result
42% fewer host onboarding steps
Next.js
Stripe
PostgreSQL
AWS
Sanity
Delivery Read
A booking marketplace depends on host trust and calendar accuracy.
The product model centered on host onboarding, property data quality, availability, guest booking confidence, payments, reviews, and dispute workflows.
Host listing and verification flow
Search, calendar, and reservation logic
Payment, refund, and review states
Operations dashboard for marketplace support
The Challenge
StayNest is a short-term rental marketplace targeting the boutique and experiential travel segment. The founders wanted to differentiate from generic listing platforms by emphasizing curated properties, host storytelling, and a booking experience that felt personal rather than transactional. They needed a two-sided marketplace with host onboarding, property quality review, availability management, booking flows, and a payment split between platform and host.
The key challenge was reducing host onboarding friction. The founders had observed that competing platforms lost 60% of prospective hosts during the listing setup process. They needed a workflow that felt guided, fast, and rewarding — without sacrificing data quality.
What We Built
We designed and built a full rental marketplace with three primary interfaces: a guest booking app (iOS and Android), a host management portal (web), and an admin operations console. The guest experience centers on discovery — map-based search, rich property pages with host stories, availability calendars, and a frictionless booking flow.
The host onboarding pipeline was re-engineered to reduce steps by 42% compared to the industry standard. Key innovations include:
Progressive listing creation — hosts can publish a draft listing and add details incrementally without losing visibility
AI-assisted photo selection that suggests the best cover image based on composition and lighting
A host quality score that replaces rigid checklists with actionable feedback
Split-payment infrastructure that handles host payouts, platform fees, security deposits, and tax calculation per jurisdiction
Automated host verification with ID scan, phone validation, and payout account setup in a single guided flow
Architecture and Tech Stack
The guest app is built in React Native with offline-first capabilities for browsing saved properties. The host portal and admin console run on Next.js with Sanity as the content layer for editorial content and property descriptions. PostgreSQL handles transactional data (bookings, payouts, reviews), while a search index powered by Algolia delivers sub-100ms property queries with faceted filtering.
Stripe Connect manages the split-payment infrastructure, handling host onboarding, payouts, refunds, and dispute management. AWS S3 stores property media, with a CloudFront CDN for global delivery. The entire stack is deployed via Terraform-managed infrastructure on AWS.
Results
The host onboarding redesign resulted in a 42% reduction in steps, driving a measurable increase in completed listings. Within 3 months of launch, StayNest onboarded 580 hosts across 4 markets, processed 2,300 bookings, and maintained a 94% host satisfaction score.
The split-payment system handled multi-currency settlements across 4 countries with zero reconciliation errors in the first quarter of operation.