A hotel occupancy dashboard built in one day

A small hotel selling through Booking.com, Airbnb, Expedia and its own site has no single place to see how full it is right now, or which channel is actually filling it. The manager opens each platform separately and assembles the answer by hand. Room View Insight was a one-day attempt to build the hotel occupancy dashboard that answers both questions from live data.

The loop it needed to prove was short. An owner signs up, enters the property name and room count, connects the booking channels, and live bookings are read into an occupancy figure alongside a breakdown of which channel each booking came through. Two of the four planned tabs do that end to end, computing real occupancy and a real channel mix from real bookings.

The other two never got there. Connecting a channel is still a toggle rather than an integration, and the calendar view is placeholder data. A dashboard that shows a calendar full of invented bookings is worse than one with no calendar, because it looks finished, so this project is a spike that proved the loop and then stopped.

What one day of work settled is where the difficulty actually is. Computing occupancy from bookings once they are in one place is straightforward. Getting them into one place from four platforms, each with its own terms, its own access rules and its own idea of what a booking record contains, is the real product, and a toggle labelled connect is where that work has been deferred rather than done.

That is useful to know before committing weeks to it, which is what a spike is for. Nothing has been added since, and the case study says so rather than presenting two working tabs as four.