Case study Hospitality
Highly Adjustable Platform for entertainment industries
unicrew developed a platform for Booked It that enhanced the customer experience for nightclub, entertainment center, and festival goers.
Booked It provides booking management software to the hospitality, leisure, and entertainment industries. Its original nightlife product could not easily be adapted to new markets, so unicrew built the first version of a highly adjustable platform, refactored onto Laravel and migrated to AWS. Over 600 businesses now use it, with bookings up 19% and spend per head up 13% on average.
- Client
- Booked It
- Focus
- Hospitality, Leisure
- Market
United Kingdom- Engagement
- Platform build and AWS migration
- Stack
Laravel
React
AWS
Outcome at a glance
What this project delivered, in numbers.
- 600+Businesses using the platform
- 19%Increase in bookingsOn average
- 13%Increase in spend per headOn average
Project Overview
The company sells booking management software into the hospitality, leisure, and entertainment industries, and for years its business ran on one product. Licklist, founded in 2012, is a social marketplace for nightlife and music festivals where users search a database of bars, clubs, and events, book tickets, keep and share lists of favorite venues, review the places they go, and connect with other nightlife enthusiasts. The company is headquartered in London, UK, and has over 6,000 listed venues across the UK.
COVID-19 shifted the industry landscape, and the founders decided to widen the product rather than wait it out. They wanted something flexible enough for festival organizers and leisure centers, not only for the nightlife venues Licklist had been built around.
Challenge
Licklist was built for nightlife providers and did that job well. But it had been developed long ago, it did not meet modern usability standards, and it was tied to one type of venue. Moving it to a new market was not a configuration change.
So the founders asked for a highly adjustable platform that could replace Licklist or run separately for a new market and target audience. Three things made that hard:
- A wide variety of conceivable venues, each with different offers for end users.
- The COVID-19 pandemic shifted the client’s vision mid-flight, and new features and workflows had to be adopted.
- The scope of the end application, and the number of features providers and venues needed, kept changing.
Solution
unicrew’s engineers built the first version of a highly adjustable platform serving all three user types: administrators, venues, and customers. It can be adapted to almost any new venue type and end user. The build used Laravel and React.js, and Laravel was the choice for a specific reason: the legacy system was not built on a framework at all, so the code was refactored onto one.
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Highly adjustable platform: suitable for multiple types of venues and straightforward to move from one market to another.
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Adaptive UI: venue owners switch between event types in a few clicks, so they can reshape their own platform for a new market quickly.
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Cloud migration plan: the financial reasoning (FinOps) alongside technical specifications for the scalability and security requirements.
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Migration to AWS: once the client approved that plan, unicrew’s engineers ran the migration itself.
Result
Booked It now runs a single platform that covers its customers’ basic needs across many venue types, not just the nightlife venues it started with. Over 600 businesses use it, and on average they have seen a 19% increase in bookings and a 13% increase in spend per head. The wider fit let Booked It grow its customer base, offer more features, and give end users a more usable product.
The refactor changed the maintenance picture too. On Laravel the codebase is more stable, easier to maintain, and easier to add new features to than the unframeworked original was.
Adjustability is the recurring problem in venue software: one booking engine has to serve a nightclub, a festival, and a leisure center without a rebuild each time. We met it again in our hybrid-events software for scientific congresses. Other clients describe how we work on the client reviews page.
What the client says
Our platform has been refactored to Laravel ensuring the code base is more stable, easier to maintain and easier to add new features. Their professionalism and quality of work have stood out in the partnership. We have had the code audited by a 3rd party who was extremely complimentary of the work.
06/Quick answers
The questions behind the project
What did unicrew build for Booked It?
unicrew's engineers built the first version of a highly adjustable booking platform serving all three user types: administrators, venues, and customers. Booked It's original product, Licklist, was a nightlife marketplace developed long ago that no longer met modern usability standards and could not easily be adapted to new markets. After COVID-19 the founders wanted something that would also work for festival organizers and leisure centers. The new platform can be adapted to almost any new venue type and end user, and over 600 businesses now use it.
What did the platform change for Booked It's business?
Over 600 businesses now use the platform, and on average they have seen a 19% increase in bookings and a 13% increase in spend per head. Booked It ended up with one platform covering its customers' basic needs across venue types, which let it widen its customer base, offer more features, and give end users a more usable product. Venue owners can switch between event types in a few clicks, so they can reshape their platform for a new market quickly.
What is the stack, and how did the AWS migration work?
The platform was built with Laravel and React.js, and it runs on AWS. Laravel was the choice because the legacy system was not built on a framework at all. unicrew produced a cloud migration plan first, covering the financial reasoning (FinOps) plus technical specifications for the scalability and security requirements, and once the client approved that plan, unicrew's engineers ran the migration itself.
What experience does unicrew have with booking and events platforms?
Booking software for hospitality, leisure, and entertainment is a domain our engineers know well: multi-role systems where administrators, venues, and customers each need a different view of the same inventory, and where the difficulty is usually adjustability and a safe migration rather than the booking form itself. That experience is what we bring to a new engagement. See our hospitality and leisure technology work, or our hybrid-events software for scientific congresses.