The brief changed on a Friday. It was live on Monday.

Challenge

Taking bookings is the easy half.

Guests booked their treatments — hair and make-up, facial massage, hair and beard — from the public form on the festival landing page, built on our G-Events platform. What the hospitality desk did not have was a way to run the day: move people, handle walk-ins, change capacity, and keep track of who had been told what.

Solution

A tool the desk can drive while the queue is in front of them.

Monthly calendar, three-day view and daily agenda, filtered by service and by group. Capacity per slot with a soft threshold. Search by name, email or phone, and new guests created on the spot. A guest card with contacts, notes, group and hotel room, several bookings per guest, and overlaps blocked.

Bookings move by dragging them onto compatible slots, with a mouse, a finger or a pen. Red-carpet days replace the standard slots with in-room hair and make-up. A real-time WhatsApp inbox and SMS conversations with a character counter sit next to the agenda, with a notification centre, a per-person history and a CSV export. The operator manual is built into the tool, with an index, search, real screenshots and a PDF export.

Why it matters

This is what production risk actually looks like.

The project started in early July as a simple form with a minimal backend. After the presentation to the end client, on the last Thursday of the month, the requirements changed: graphical calendar, drag-and-drop, database search, unregistered guests, history, multiple logins, treatment durations, slots editable during the day and around the red carpets, WhatsApp and SMS.

The request arrived on the Friday afternoon. The first working version was online on the Monday, because the emails that opened the bookings went out on the Tuesday. Features kept arriving in the weeks that followed, including multi-slot selection by dragging a box with Shift held down, per-group durations and per-booking notes.