Hotel Management System in Leakey, Texas

We started with the Frio River ranch last spring because their pain points mirrored what we see in every smaller Texas Hill Country property: no central dashboard, no way to block inventory during maintenance, and no integration between the POS system and the booking calendar. The first thing we noticed was their reservation system couldn’t handle split-stay bookings, three families booking two nights each in the same cabin for different dates were treated as one reservation. That mistake alone was costing them $18,000 a year in lost upsells and cleaning fees. We rebuilt the availability engine in Laravel to treat each cabin as a multi-unit resource with flexible date ranges, then exposed the logic through a React dashboard that the front desk could update in real time. The owner’s wife runs the front desk between 6 and 9 AM; she now sees the same numbers the owner sees at 11 PM without ever logging into QuickBooks again.


The ranch also needed a way to manage add-ons like river tubes and breakfast baskets without creating a new reservation line item every time. We built a micro-service in Node.js that hooks into the hotel’s existing Stripe account and exposes a REST API so the booking widget can push add-on purchases directly to the POS terminal. Guests pay via the same checkout flow they use for the room, and housekeeping gets an alert when a cabin is marked "dirty" only after checkout, not when the tube rental is returned. That eliminated the $2,400 in manual refunds they issued last summer when tubes came back late but rooms were already prepped.


Most hotel software assumes you have a concierge on staff to manage packages, but Leakey’s properties are often family-run with seasonal help. We used Flutter to build a mobile companion app that front-desk staff can hand to guests for self-check-in when the office is empty. The app scans a QR code on the reservation confirmation and walks guests through the same questions we built for the ranch, ID scan, special requests, add-on selection, then prints a door code at the kiosk. During the summer surge when four families check in at once, the line moves without the owner ever leaving the river.


At the end of the season we audited their error logs and found 40% fewer front-desk calls about availability after we launched the new system. Repeat bookings from the same families went up 22% because the app saved their preferences and sent automated thank-you emails with a 10% off coupon for next year. The owner told us the only spreadsheet they keep now is the one tracking which cabins leak in heavy rain.