Ala Cinco

Category: Hospitality
Platform: Web App
Year: 2025; Built
Developer: Jake
Stat: 1,000+; users in production
Stat: 420+; API routes
Stat: 103; database models

Preview

Web · Desktop & Mobile

The booking website and staff dashboard of Ala Cinco, a staycation brand in the Philippines with 1,000+ users in production. The new version redesigns the guest site screen by screen: find a stay, reserve, pay by QR, e-wallet, bank or card, and add every guest’s ID before check-in. Behind it, a money ledger accounts for every peso and an affiliate program pays the people who bring in bookings.

What's Included

Home with location filters, featured stays and bundle deals
Listing page with a photo gallery, price breakdown and a reserve sheet on phones
Pay in full or 50% down by QR (GCash, Maya), e-wallet, online banking or card
Upload a receipt and follow the booking while staff verify it
Guest list with ID upload, due 24 hours before check-in
Self-service reschedule and cancel, with a staff approval queue
Affiliate program with referral links, a wallet, commissions and payouts
Host onboarding funnel and owner portal
Money ledger with reconciliation, approvals and health checks
Realtime support chat, plus Telegram alerts for staff
Roles and permissions scoped by location, 2FA and audit logs
Light and dark theme, installable as an app

The Problem

A staycation brand needed its own booking site: a guest finds a free date, books, verifies their ID and pays in one flow, and no unit is ever booked twice. As it grew it needed more: a guest site that feels like the apps people already use, books that account for every peso, and a way to pay the people who bring in guests.

By the Numbers

1,000+
users in production
420+
API routes
103
database models
118
pages and screens
172
merged pull requests

Under the Hood

Highlight 01
A redesign shipped page by page
I rebuilt the guest site from the Figma designs one screen at a time: home, listing, payment, booking details, guests and wallet. New design tokens sit behind a per-page switch, so redesigned and old pages could go live side by side.
Highlight 02
No double bookings
A guest booking, a reschedule, a bundle and a drag on the staff Gantt board all go through a lock, so two people can’t take the same unit on the same date.
Highlight 03
Payments that don’t hang on one webhook
PayMongo checkouts confirm through webhooks, and a sweep every 15 seconds reconciles any payment whose webhook never came. Manual QR payments wait for a staff check of the receipt.
Highlight 04
A ledger for every peso
Money moves into an insert-only ledger in integer centavos, written through its own restricted database login. Each entry is hash-chained to the one before, so a hand edit breaks the chain check, and a correction is always a new reversal entry.
Highlight 05
Checked against PayMongo
A health check matches every PayMongo payment and refund against the ledger, and money it can’t explain goes to a review queue. Before release I rehearsed it on staging against PayMongo’s live export.
Highlight 06
Affiliates paid as the guest pays
Commissions are earned in parts as the guest’s money comes in, then move from earned to available to paid out. Commission settings change only with two admins’ approval, and flags catch bookings from the affiliate’s own network or browser.

Information