La Lancha
A booking website and a fully automated back-office for a one-boat charter business on Lake Michigan.
The problem
A solo charter operator cannot manually juggle bookings across platforms, calendar conflicts, deposits, signed legal waivers, fuel invoicing, and review requests. Double-bookings and missed paperwork cost real revenue and create liability.
What I built
An Astro marketing + booking site (live per-date pricing and availability) backed by a single Google Apps Script web app that runs the entire operation. A new booking checks the Google Calendar with a race-condition guard, auto-creates the event, spins up a Drive folder, logs the booking, seeds the guest roster, and fires templated onboarding emails to guest and owner.
How AI was leveraged
Built rapidly with AI-assisted development. A maintainer primer (CLAUDE.md) encodes the full data flow so the system stays AI-maintainable — any future Claude session can pick it up cold.
Engineering highlights
- Live Stripe payments via prefilled links + JotForm charter agreement & waivers
- A 10-minute reconciliation timer reads JotForm→Sheets data and stamps Paid / AgreementSigned / WaiverSigned back onto bookings, alerting on payment-amount mismatches
- Captain post-charter form auto-computes fuel cost and emails the owner what to invoice
- Daily triggers: waiver-reminder digests and automated Google-review requests to finished charters
Outcome
Shipped with live external integrations (Stripe live, Google Workspace, JotForm). Running the business today.
Grandson's Construction