Border City Bus Lines: an automated booking system for a charter bus startup.
Border City Bus Lines is a new charter and party bus company in Windsor-Essex, run by owners Mike and Nina. We're building them a custom online booking engine that handles seats, deposits, reminders and follow-ups, so routine bookings don't need someone waiting by the phone.
Bookings that depended on phone calls and back-and-forth.
As a new business, Border City Bus Lines gets most of its work through word of mouth. Every charter meant checking which bus was free, working out a price, collecting a deposit and remembering to follow up before the trip.
Mike and Nina wanted customers to be able to see availability, pick a package and pay online, with the normal cases running on their own and only the exceptions landing on their desk.
A custom booking engine, connected to their CRM.
Online booking engine
A custom PHP/MySQL booking system that tracks seat and bus availability across both 24-seat buses, so the same date can't be double-booked.
Packages, tickets & deposits
Charter packages take a 50% deposit at checkout, and we're building automatic charging of the balance on trip day for launch. Event tickets are paid in full. Tax is added at checkout.
HighLevel CRM integration
Every booking flows into a dedicated HighLevel pipeline with its own custom fields, so the owners can see each customer and trip in one place.
Automated customer messages
A booking confirmation, then reminders 7 days and 1 day before the trip. An optional review request the day after is coming with the launch build.
Staff dashboard
A private dashboard for the owners showing upcoming trips, bus availability by day, events and anything that needs attention.
Health monitoring & alerts
Background checks watch the booking, CRM and messaging services, with outage alerts and uptime monitoring so problems surface quickly.
From "is the bus free?" to a confirmed trip.
- The customer picks a date and package. The booking page shows live availability for one or both buses.
- They pay online. Packages take a 50% deposit; event tickets are paid in full. Tax is calculated at checkout.
- The booking lands in the CRM. A confirmation goes out and the trip appears on the staff dashboard.
- Reminders go out automatically. Customers hear from Border City 7 days and 1 day before their trip.
- Trip day. We're building automatic charging of the remaining balance to the saved card for launch.
- After the trip. An optional next-day review request is coming with the launch build.
Built custom, built to be fast.
Instead of forcing an off-the-shelf booking plugin to fit a two-bus fleet, we built a lightweight custom engine in PHP and MySQL, with HighLevel handling the CRM pipeline. Paid features are tested in a separate, isolated environment before anything touches real customers.
We also tuned the public website for speed on phones. We optimized the images and logo, made the fonts non-blocking and fixed layout shift on the booking calendar.
Home page, mobile Lighthouse performance
Booking page, mobile Lighthouse performance
Mobile Lighthouse performance scores, before and after our front-end work.
Launching soon.
The booking system is in final testing ahead of launch. Online payments aren't live yet. We're finishing payment setup and end-to-end testing with the owners before bookings open to the public.
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