The product
Guestay is a vacation-rental platform focused on kosher stays for families and groups. Its public experience combines property discovery with travel dates, guest counts, destination browsing, and accommodation details. Guests can explore rentals and experiences, while property owners have a dedicated host-facing entry point.
That visible booking journey is one part of a wider hospitality workflow. Guests need clear information before a stay and timely communication afterward. Hosts need ways to work with listings, calendars, and earnings. Operations staff need a connected view of bookings, messages, and the work required to support each stay. These audiences interact with different parts of the product, but they are participating in the same service journey.
- Guest
Discover and book
- Host
Manage the stay
- Operations
Coordinate the workflow
The challenge
My work centered on evolving an established platform while its existing administrative tools continued to be used. A newer web interface needed to become a working operational product, with behavior that matched the established booking system. Replacing screens alone would not be enough: each module needed to connect to real application behavior and fit the workflows of the people using it.
The project also required careful coordination across public-facing, host-facing, and administrative experiences. Changes needed a clear scope, a reviewable implementation, and checks that focused on how the complete workflow behaved.
My contribution
As a contract Technical Lead with Webaryco, I owned technical decisions, reviewed and integrated peer contributions, and directed the progression of work through implementation, validation, and release. I collaborated with a UI/UX designer and other developers. This was technical leadership through engineering decisions and delivery ownership.
I directed the incremental modernization of the administrative experience. Rather than replace the established application in one step, I worked module by module, connecting the Next.js interface to the existing backend and using established behavior as the reference. My scope included host-portal functionality, operational workflows, and guest communications.
A substantial part of implementation was AI-assisted. I used Claude Code and OpenAI Codex to develop plans, produce implementation work, and support reviews. I reviewed and edited the resulting work, tested important behavior myself, resolved product questions, and made the release decisions. I also reviewed contributions from peers rather than treating the work as a solo rebuild.
Technical decisions
I chose an incremental integration approach in which the Next.js application mediated its UI requests and the existing PHP backend continued to hold established business behavior. This kept modernization grounded in the functioning product and gave each module a concrete reference for comparison.
For guest communications, I directed work on reusable replies, messaging automation, and clearer conversation ownership. I focused on operational questions that users can recognize: which conversation needs a reply, who is responsible for it, and how routine communication can be prepared consistently. Those decisions translated business requirements into features with a defined scope and review process.
Outcome
Working modules of the modernized administrative experience reached production, alongside improvements to host workflows and guest messaging. The migration remains an incremental effort, with established and newer administrative experiences continuing alongside one another. The case reflects ongoing modernization of a live hospitality product, with my contribution centered on technical direction, review, hands-on validation, and release ownership.
Relevant stack
Next.js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, CodeIgniter / PHP, and MariaDB.
Claude Code and OpenAI Codex supported the engineering workflow.