The latest articles on DEV Community by FullDo (@fulldo). https://dev.to/fulldo https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F4147180%2F48eebb4a-474d-467f-9b3f-dd1c6baaae1d.png https://dev.to/fulldo en FullDo Tue, 29 Sep 2026 07:09:02 +0000 https://dev.to/fulldo/why-a-shopping-cart-cant-price-a-hotel-stay-20i0 https://dev.to/fulldo/why-a-shopping-cart-cant-price-a-hotel-stay-20i0 <p>If you have ever tried to sell hotel stays through a regular e-commerce stack, you hit the wall fast. A product has a price. A hotel night does not: it has a contract.</p> <p>While building <a href="https://fulltravel.fr/" rel="noopener noreferrer">FullTravel</a>, a SaaS for independent inbound agencies and tour operators, I had to model what hotels actually send. Here is the list of concepts a pricing engine has to understand before it can quote a single stay correctly:</p> <ul> <li> <strong>Board basis</strong>: room only, bed and breakfast, half board, full board. The same room has a different net rate for each.</li> <li> <strong>Seasons and periods</strong>: rates change by date range, and a stay that crosses two periods has to be priced night by night, not with one rate.</li> <li> <strong>Occupancy</strong>: the rate for a room depends on how many adults are in it.</li> <li> <strong>Child policies</strong>: "a child aged 2 to 11 sharing a room with two adults pays 50% of the adult rate" is a rule, not a price.</li> <li> <strong>Supplements and promotions</strong>: sea view, single use, early booking, long stay.</li> <li> <strong>Allotments and stop-sell</strong>: the agency holds a number of rooms, which must be decremented on booking and released on cancellation, and a hotel can close sales on specific dates.</li> <li> <strong>Tiered transfers and excursions with sessions</strong>: a transfer price depends on the group size, an excursion has departure times with limited seats.</li> <li> <strong>Packaged stays, reseller commissions, deposit and balance</strong>.</li> </ul> <p>None of this fits in a <code>price</code> column. The engine has to evaluate a stay as a sequence of nights, apply the right contract line to each one, then layer child policies, supplements, promotions and margin on top.</p> <h2> Letting AI read the contract, without trusting it blindly </h2> <p>Contract entry is the slowest step for an agency, so FullTravel uses AI to read the hotel's PDF and propose the rate grid. Two rules made this safe to ship:</p> <ol> <li>Nothing is published without a human validating it.</li> <li>Every extracted value keeps a reference to the line of the document it came from, so the reviewer can check the source in one click, and discrepancies are flagged.</li> </ol> <h2> One catalogue, three front ends </h2> <p>The same catalogue feeds the back-office, the agency's own booking site and a reseller extranet with net rates. Changing a rate once updates all three, which is what agencies actually wanted: fewer places where a price can be wrong.</p> <p>The stack is Symfony and PostgreSQL. If you work in travel tech, the demo is open: <a href="https://fulltravel.fr/" rel="noopener noreferrer">https://fulltravel.fr/</a></p> <p>I'm Soumaya Khalifa, founder of <a href="https://fulldo.fr/" rel="noopener noreferrer">FullDo</a>, where I build websites and custom business tools for small businesses and agencies.</p> webdev saas architecture travel