Quick Summary📌
Travlu is a hotel booking and management platform that operates across the United States and Canada. AirOxa worked closely with the client to develop and maintain a scalable, secure hotel booking system and localized hotel portals using PHP (Laravel), MySQL, and JavaScript.
Introduction
The hospitality industry in North America is a competitive space. Hotel owners often struggle to maintain direct customer relationships due to third-party booking platforms, while travelers want the ease of online bookings with local-level personalization. Travlu bridges this gap by offering a dual-purpose platform: it enables direct hotel bookings for customers while also providing custom-branded booking portals for hotels themselves.
To bring this vision to life, Travlu partnered with AirOxa to lead the technical development of their booking infrastructure and hotel portal ecosystem. This Travlu hotel booking platform case study highlights how AirOxa helped scale a complex travel tech product built to serve both end-users and hotel businesses.
Project Objectives
The client approached AirOxa, intending to expand Travlu’s functionality while keeping the platform stable and intuitive. The main objectives were:
- Develop a scalable hotel booking engine
- Enable direct hotel bookings via Travlu.com
- Build localized portals for individual hotel partners
- Implement a backend system to manage bookings, content, pricing, and availability
- Ensure compatibility with desktop and mobile platforms
- Maintain strong performance, even with high booking traffic
AirOxa’s Role
AirOxa was tasked with full-cycle product engineering support, focusing on both backend infrastructure and user-facing functionality. This included architecture planning, development, deployment, and support.
💡 Backend Architecture & Booking Engine
At the core of Travlu’s platform is its booking engine. AirOxa built this using Laravel (PHP) for performance, maintainability, and scalability. The engine handles:
- Real-time room availability and pricing
- Custom cancellation rules
- Seasonal pricing updates
- Multi-room, multi-property booking support
- Hotel-specific offers and discount codes
All bookings are processed through a secure backend with MySQL as the data store, optimized for fast lookups and transactional integrity.
🖥️ Hotel Portals & Localization
Travlu also operates a growing number of white-labeled hotel web portals, each customized for individual hotel brands across the U.S. and Canada. AirOxa created a modular system where hotel portals are connected to Travlu’s core engine but come with their own:
- Branding
- Booking widgets
- CMS access
- Language options (based on region)
- Reporting dashboards
This setup gives hotel owners full control over their online presence while benefiting from Travlu’s infrastructure and support.
📱 Responsive Front-End
Using JavaScript and jQuery, the AirOxa team built a responsive UI for both desktop and mobile. The front-end prioritizes:
- Fast search and filtering by destination, date, price, and rating
- A seamless user journey from hotel discovery to checkout
- Real-time feedback on room availability
- Secure guest information handling
The booking UI is lightweight but informative, providing a user experience similar to industry leaders.
🔐 Security & Payment Infrastructure
AirOxa integrated payment support through trusted third-party services, ensuring that customer data remains encrypted and transactions comply with international standards. Secure login sessions, audit logging, and token-based API access for hotels were all implemented.
Technology Stack Overview
| Component | Technology |
|---|---|
| Backend | PHP (Laravel) |
| Frontend | JavaScript, jQuery |
| Database | MySQL |
| Infrastructure | Apache/Nginx |
| Deployment | Git + CI Pipelines |
| Third Party APIs | Stripe, Sendgrid |
Collaboration Approach
AirOxa’s collaboration with Travlu wasn’t limited to code. The team engaged with stakeholders, including product managers and hotel marketing teams, to understand industry-specific workflows. Regular sprints, demos, and testing ensured alignment at every stage. This agile approach made it possible to adapt quickly when new hotels were onboarded or business logic evolved.
Key Achievements
- Delivered a stable and scalable hotel booking engine
- Built over 100+ localized hotel portals, each dynamically pulling from a central system
- Reduced booking errors by creating real-time availability tracking
- Enabled faster rollout of new hotel partners using modular code
- Built a seamless mobile-first booking experience with a conversion-oriented UI
Final Thoughts
The Travlu hotel booking platform is an example of how strong engineering and deep domain understanding can power a multi-tenant travel service. AirOxa’s ability to balance backend complexity with front-end simplicity helped the client offer a robust booking solution without overwhelming users.
Travlu continues to serve travelers across North America while empowering hotel owners with modern tools for direct guest engagement.
Want to Build a Platform Like Travlu?
Whether you’re starting a travel platform or expanding an existing system, AirOxa can help. From backend architecture to branded portals, we’ve done it — and we can do it for you.
👉 Reach out today and let’s build something great.