Booking Module Development
The outcome
- 2Production modules
- 2Weeks to ship
- 27Years of legacy logic
The situation
The challenge
Cuba Travel Services has been helping US travelers get to Cuba legally since 1999. Michael and Lisa Zuccato run two companies simultaneously with a small IT team split across both. They needed an embedded technical partner to give that team the bandwidth to keep building without bottlenecks. The platform lives in Supabase, started in Lovable, and day-to-day development runs through Claude Code and GitHub.
This wasn't a greenfield build. It was joining an active platform mid-flight and getting up to speed on 27 years of business logic fast enough to ship real features without breaking what was already working. The first two-week sprint covered two modules: dining and accommodations.
The work
What was built
Dining came first. A full reservation flow with an admin-facing editor, publish and delete controls, CSV export, auto-computed pricing, and cutoff logic. If a reservation falls within the cutoff window and is already in a customer's cart, the cart blocks checkout rather than letting the booking go through. Getting that behavior right required careful coordination across the reservation logic, cart state, and checkout flow.
Accommodations was more complex. Cuba Travel Services books hotels two ways: full property buyouts and per-room rates. The system handles both cleanly. On top of that, stop-sale functionality lets staff block specific date ranges for specific rooms when inventory is unavailable. Stop-sold rooms show as unavailable on the property detail page and are hard-blocked at the cart and checkout level. Not just visually greyed out.
The accommodations build also included an occupancy-based pricesheet editor, search with persisted state across pages, check-in and check-out time handling, a full-house confirmation dialog for buyout bookings, and email confirmations with full stay details. Rate data was migrated from the legacy OpenCart system and run through a parity check against the source export.
Both modules are fully manageable by non-technical staff through the admin portal. No code required to update rates, toggle availability, or manage inventory.
The outcome
Results
Two production modules live in two weeks. Ongoing monthly retainer. Red Mage operates as an extension of the CTS technical team, handling feature work and the detailed logic review a team stretched across two companies doesn't always have capacity for.