A mini-Booking for hostel owners. This system lets hostel managers handle reservations, room assignments, and staff tasks — all without paying commission to the big aggregators. I built it as a self-hosted panel that hostel chains could run on their own servers.
What it does
The core is a reservation calendar. Hostel staff see all rooms and beds laid out on a timeline — who's arriving, who's leaving, which beds are free. Drag and drop to move guests around, click to create a new booking.
Beyond reservations, there's a task management layer. Managers can assign cleaning schedules, maintenance jobs, and other tasks to staff members. Each task has a status, a deadline, and an assignee.
The build
React frontend with a Node.js backend. The trickiest part was the calendar component — hostels have beds, not rooms, and a single room might have 8-12 beds with different pricing. Getting the visual layout right while keeping the booking logic bulletproof took some serious iteration.
The system was designed for hostels specifically, not hotels. That means shared rooms, per-bed pricing, and the chaotic reality of backpacker lodging. It's a different world from a Hilton, and the software needed to reflect that.
