Hospitality·San Félix Glamping
How San Félix Glamping will sell its cabin without paying commission to any middleman, with its own booking engine tied to Bold. The project is in progress: the cabin opens in the coming months.
San Félix Glamping is a high-end cabin on a private farm in San Félix, Antioquia, overlooking the Medellín valley, with a farm of cows, donkeys, sheep and goats. It is a few months from opening.
The leading operator in the area closes 100% of its bookings over WhatsApp: every availability check is done by hand, every payment is arranged by message and every confirmation depends on someone being at the phone. The usual alternative, listing on Airbnb or Booking, solves the scheduling but takes a commission on every night sold.
The engagement also came with an explicit budget constraint: USD 10 to 15 a month in third-party services. That rules out most commercial booking engines before you start.
We evaluated two paths and documented why the easy one was ruled out. The third-party option (Beds24, between EUR 11 and 16 a month) came with a calendar, overbooking protection and emails solved, but it only integrates payments natively with Stripe: the connection to Bold would have had to be built anyway. And its booking page embeds via iframe, which would have wrecked the site's custom design. So we built the native engine, with these pieces:
The result is an end-to-end flow with no human intervention: the guest picks dates, pays and gets a confirmation email while the owner gets the alert. The event space is deliberately left out of the engine in version 1.0: its logic is different (per day, with capacity, customized) and it is coordinated over WhatsApp until it justifies automating.
By selling through its own channel instead of Airbnb or Booking, the full margin on each booking stays in the business. This is a property of the design, not a measured figure: the cabin has not opened yet.
The booking moves to confirmed with Bold's validated webhook. The guest is not left waiting for a message and the owner does not have to be available to close a sale.
The native architecture on serverless services keeps third-party costs under the ceiling the client set, something the commercial engine we evaluated could not do.
We documented the channel-manager alternative as plan B: if the business later decides to also sell on Airbnb or Booking, the decision is already analyzed and there is no need to start from scratch.
We understood the business, the leading operator in the area and the real budget constraint on third-party services.
We compared a third-party engine against a native one and documented why the third-party option did not solve the problem: Bold does not integrate natively with any commercial engine.
We wired the existing design to a serverless backend with its own database and integrated Bold through its payment-link API with webhook signature validation.
Pending: goes to production when the cabin opens, in the coming months.
