Konak
Luxury boutique hospitality — booked direct, run effortlessly.
Visit live site
Overview
The challenge
Boutique hotels lose 15–25% of every booking to OTA commissions — and get a generic, off-brand guest experience in return. Vila Marin needed a direct-booking platform as elegant as its 1954 Dalmatian-stone architecture: fast, cinematic, and fully owned.
Swapping in an off-the-shelf booking widget solves the commission problem but not the actual one — it still looks and feels like every other hotel's booking widget, which undercuts the exact premium, one-of-a-kind positioning a boutique property is trying to sell.
The approach
Immerse
A cinematic auto-playing hero with GSAP scroll-parallax sets the tone in the first second — with crafted static fallbacks for reduced-motion.
Book
A frictionless multi-step international checkout — live availability, flexible ID validation and secure payments, built to convert.
Belong
A secure guest portal: reservations, invoices, QR check-in and a personalised itinerary timeline.
Operate
Konak's engine runs it all — MongoDB date-conflict resolution, automated arrivals & housekeeping, and Resend transactional emails.
Tech decisions
Two motion libraries doing two different jobs: Framer Motion drives React-state UI transitions (the booking flow, the guest portal), while GSAP's ScrollTrigger handles the frame-accurate, scroll-scrubbed cinematic parallax the hero needed — one tool doesn't do both well.
Room types, seasonal pricing and itinerary data don't share one rigid shape — a document database lets each room's data stay flexible instead of forcing every property into identical fixed columns.
Every booking field (dates, guest counts, payment details) is validated at the boundary before it touches the database, and Resend handles the transactional confirmation email — for a guest, that email is the entire trust signal that their booking actually went through.
Inside the build
Live walkthrough
01. The Platform
Konak — the AI-assisted management platform that powers the whole property, from first impact to checkout.
02. The Guest Site
Vila Marin's cinematic front-end — parallax storytelling that turns browsing into booking.
03. Front-Desk Engine
The operations dashboard — daily arrivals, departures and housekeeping turnover generated automatically.
What it delivers
OTA commission — 100% direct bookings
Every booking made through the site keeps its full value — nothing goes to a third-party platform.
Contactless check-in & invoices
Guests skip the front-desk queue; the paperwork happens automatically in the background.
Automated front-desk operations
Arrivals, departures and housekeeping schedules generate themselves — no manual roster juggling.
International guest checkout
A guest from anywhere in Europe can book and pay without friction at the currency or language layer.