Vila Valentino

01 / START

Starting point

Vila Valentino is a private villa in Ukmergė district, in the village of Kliepšiai by Lake Kliepšiai, roughly an hour from Vilnius, Kaunas and Panevėžys. Four bedrooms, up to ten adults, a sauna, a hot tub, a terrace, a private pond. Guests used to book by phone or through OTA platforms. Every reservation through Booking.com or Airbnb meant a commission and a third party sitting between owner and guest. So we didn't start with a WordPress theme — we started with the data model: how to hold availability, price and inquiry in one place so none of the three contradicts the others.

02 / POSITION

Why not Booking.com, why not a WordPress plugin

For a growing rental, both paths share the same weak point. An OTA platform brings traffic, but it takes a cut and keeps the customer data to itself — the owner never sees who inquired, from where, or when. WordPress with a booking plugin looks cheaper, but availability has to be entered by hand, and the plugin's calendar doesn't talk to Airbnb — miss one block and the same weekend gets sold twice. Vila Valentino skipped that stage entirely: all the logic sits in one system — one database, one source of truth for date, price and inquiry.

03 / CALENDAR

An availability calendar that thinks in nights

The booking calendar was built from scratch. The core decision: it counts in nights, not days — a stay is stored as a half-open interval* from check-in to check-out, so on the same calendar day one guest can leave in the morning and another arrive in the afternoon, without the calendar treating that day as booked for both. That's the industry standard (Airbnb, Booking.com), and one that plain plugins often get wrong.

Availability for any given date is assembled from two sources: manual blocks the owner sets on the admin side, and imported iCal events from external platforms. A new reservation can only be accepted for a slot when no active block's interval overlaps it. Check-in day carries a 3 PM Vilnius-time cutoff: after that, the current day is no longer offered as a check-in date — so a guest can't book a slot that's already gone.

04 / PRICING

Deterministic pricing with a frozen quote

Price is calculated by deterministic logic*, not a guess. Every night's rate is derived from season rules and owner-set exceptions: separate weekday and weekend night rates, a first-night surcharge, weekly (7-night) and monthly (30-night) packages, and optional extras — sauna, hot tub in winter. Every amount is stored in euro cents, with no floating-point rounding error.

Once an inquiry is submitted, the calculated quote is frozen as a separate snapshot: even if the season's rate changes later, the price shown to that guest doesn't change. This is an inquiry model — there's no checkout screen; the quote is split into a deposit and a balance, and the owner confirms the dates by hand.

05 / SYNC

iCal sync and conflict detection

The villa isn't listed only on its own site — dates get taken through Airbnb and Booking.com too. To stop the same weekend selling twice, a background worker imports the external platforms' iCal calendars every 10 minutes, reconciles them against existing records, and marks the ones that disappeared. If an import comes back empty while the database still holds active events, the system doesn't age out every record at once — so one broken response can't wipe the whole calendar.

Every sync checks for overlaps: if a manual block and an imported event collide, a conflict watch is logged, with an audit trail. The final double-booking safeguard sits in the database itself — a Postgres GiST EXCLUDE* constraint physically refuses to store two overlapping manual blocks.

06 / GEO

Geographic language routing

A Lithuanian visitor should see the Lithuanian version, a foreign visitor the English one, and neither should have to go looking for it. The root address acts as a routing decision: Cloudflare's country header and MaxMind GeoLite2* determine the visitor's country and pick the LT or EN version. The choice is written to a cookie that lasts a year, so a repeat visit doesn't re-run the geolocation. Search crawlers (Googlebot and others) are always routed to the LT version, matching the hreflang* default. Localization runs on next-intl*'s "as-needed" mode — Lithuanian content carries no locale prefix, English sits behind /en.

07 / SEO

Indexing and intent pages

Instead of one general page, the villa has separate pages by guest intent: a countryside venue for a hen party, a stag party, a family getaway, a company retreat, by the lake, with a hot tub, for Christmas. Each one is rendered server-side (SSR*) with Lithuanian meta tags and JSON-LD LodgingBusiness* markup, so Google sees the content immediately, not an empty shell. Per Search Console data (90 days), the villa is indexed across more than 25 pages in LT and EN and ranks for non-brand keywords — "sodyba mergvakariui" ("countryside venue for a hen party") at position 5–6, "sodyba bernvakariui" ("...for a stag party") at position 7, plus local queries for Ukmergė district. International impressions come not just from Lithuania but from the United Kingdom, Latvia and other countries — the EN version reaches the foreign guest.

08 / INFRA

Infrastructure and background jobs

The villa runs on servers we manage: separate containers for the website (web) and the background worker, a Postgres 16 tier-2 database, Redis* for queues, deployed through Coolify* on a Hostinger VPS. The background worker runs three queues: email (notifying the owner of a new inquiry), calendar sync (iCal import, conflict reconciliation) and maintenance (clearing stale records and rate limits). Cloudflare Turnstile* and request rate-limiting guard the form against spam, and Sentry captures errors. The admin side (better-auth*) lets the owner review inquiries, block dates, and manage season pricing and iCal sources.