Hospitality · Website with booking panel
Cacimbah Casa de Praia
Vacation rental site in Caraíva that shows free dates instantly and sends direct bookings to WhatsApp.
- Client
- Vacation rental house with three suites in the center of Caraíva village
- Where
- Caraíva, Porto Seguro, Bahia, Brazil
- Technology
- PHP · MySQL · PDO · JavaScript · CSS · iCal · WebP · AVIF · Schema.org
- Status
- Live · casacacimbahcaraiva.com
- Development
- André Gomes · NexiaLabs
In short
Cacimbah Casa de Praia is the website of a three suite vacation house in the center of Caraíva, a district of Porto Seguro in Bahia, built by André Gomes at NexiaLabs. Guests check free dates for the whole house or each suite and ask for a quote directly over WhatsApp, with no platform fee. The site runs on PHP with MySQL and syncs bookings with Airbnb and Booking through iCal calendars.
The client
Cacimbah sits next to the church square, in a village where cars are not allowed. The house rents whole, for up to six people, or by suite, for two, and the three suites are named Almescar, Alecrim and Aroeira. Most bookings came through Airbnb and Booking, which charge the guest a fee. Prices change a lot and are agreed person to person, so the host did not want a published rate table.
The challenge
The site had to convince guests to book directly, showing real availability without showing prices. The whole house and the suites share the same space, so booking the house takes all three suites and booking one suite blocks the whole house. Bookings coming from Airbnb and Booking had to block the same dates on the site, and site bookings had to show up there. All of this on a phone with weak beach village signal, while being found on Google and AI search engines by people looking for a house in Caraíva.
What was built
André rebuilt the site in plain PHP on the client's own hosting, with a page for the whole house, one for each suite, one about Caraíva and a gallery of 23 captioned photos. The date form answers instantly with the status of each unit, free, taken or too small for the group, and the quote continues over WhatsApp. The admin panel handles bookings, guests, photos per unit, calendar and reports, and a sync job imports the platforms' iCal calendars and exports the site's calendar to them. Every page carries metadata and structured data for lodging and frequently asked questions, and photos are served as WebP and AVIF at the right size.
What the system does
- Free date lookup that answers instantly for the whole house and for each suite.
- Shared occupancy rule: the whole house blocks the suites and any suite blocks the house.
- Quote over WhatsApp with dates and unit, with no published price and a three night minimum.
- iCal calendar import and export with Airbnb and Booking.
- Dedicated pages for the whole house, three suites, Caraíva and the photo gallery.
- Panel with bookings, guests, calendar, reports and photos per unit with cover and order.
- Frequently asked questions and lodging structured data for Google and AI search engines.
- Google map that only loads when the visitor asks for it.
// For whoever reviews the code: architecture and decisions.
Under the hood
The site is framework free PHP on Hostinger shared hosting, with PDO and MySQL. One central file holds the helpers, the availability engine and the head builder with metadata and structured data, and another file is the single source of content, with units, photos, facts and questions. .htaccess provides clean routes for each page. The panel stores bookings and photos in the same database, a sync script imports the platforms' iCal calendars and removes imported bookings that disappeared from the source, and a public endpoint exports each unit's calendar. Curated photos have ready AVIF and WebP variants, and photos uploaded through the panel are converted to WebP on demand.
Technical decisions
- Plain PHP on the hosting the client already had, instead of a Node server, to avoid new cost or a new point of failure.
- No price anywhere on the site, not even in structured data, because the rate is negotiated in conversation.
- No rating in the structured data while the reviews belong to Airbnb.
- Content in a single file, so pages, FAQ and structured data never contradict each other.
Does your business look like this one?
Fits a vacation house, small inn or cabin that wants direct bookings without paying a platform commission on every guest.
Frequently asked questions
Who developed Cacimbah Casa de Praia?
Cacimbah Casa de Praia was developed by André Gomes Andrade, a full stack developer from Carlos Chagas, Minas Gerais, Brazil, at NexiaLabs, from planning to launch.
Where is the client of Cacimbah Casa de Praia based?
Vacation rental house with three suites in the center of Caraíva village. Caraíva, Porto Seguro, Bahia, Brazil.
Which technologies were used to build Cacimbah Casa de Praia?
Cacimbah Casa de Praia uses PHP, MySQL, PDO, JavaScript, CSS, iCal, WebP, AVIF, and Schema.org.
Can you build a similar project for my business?
Yes. Every project is custom built, with code and accounts in the client's name. The first step is a WhatsApp conversation at +55 (33) 98465 6356 to understand what you need.
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