Litchi Hospitality

Rescuing a Mission-Critical Hospitality Platform

Litchi Hospitality had an ambitious vision: give hotels, guest houses and lodges a single platform to manage direct bookings, synchronise availability across Online Travel Agencies like Booking.com, Expedia and Agoda, and grow their digital presence through social media and OTA management services. The previous development effort, however, had stalled, leaving the business with an incomplete, unreliable codebase that could not go to market.

Beyond the immediate code-quality issues, the platform needed deep, two-way integrations with multiple property management systems (NightsBridge, Semper and RMS Cloud), each with its own data model, authentication scheme and rate/availability API. Without these integrations, properties could not keep real-time rates and inventory in sync, making the booking engine effectively unusable at scale.

A Ground-Up Rebuild on Next.js and Azure

Vulcan Labs stepped in to rescue the project. After a thorough audit of the existing codebase, we made the pragmatic decision to rebuild the platform from scratch on a modern Next.js stack. This gave Litchi a fast, SEO-friendly frontend, server-side rendering for dynamic rate and availability pages, and a robust API layer, all within a single deployable application.

The platform was architected around three product pillars:

• Online Booking Engine (OBE) — A conversion-optimised widget that embeds on any property website, displaying live availability, real-time rates and instant payment confirmation, turning website visitors into commission-free direct bookings.
• Channel Manager — A centralised hub that synchronises rates, restrictions and inventory across major OTAs in real time, eliminating overbookings and manual rate updates.
• Venues Booking Engine — A purpose-built interface for conference rooms, wedding venues and function halls, allowing event clients to check availability and book directly.

Connecting the Ecosystem

A critical success factor was seamless integration with the property management systems that accommodation providers already rely on. We built and maintained three bi-directional integrations:

• NightsBridge — South Africa's most widely used accommodation booking platform. Our integration pulls live availability and pushes confirmed reservations back, keeping both systems in perfect sync.
• Semper — A PMS popular with boutique hotels and guest houses. We implemented rate and inventory synchronisation to ensure pricing consistency across direct and OTA channels.
• RMS Cloud — A global cloud-based PMS. Our connector handles reservation delivery, rate plan mapping and real-time availability updates for larger, multi-property operations.

What began as a rescued project is now a thriving SaaS platform serving over 4 500 locations, with more than 1 200 events booked through the engine and a 99.9% uptime track record. Litchi Hospitality's clients, from single-property guest houses to multi-location hotel groups, benefit from increased direct bookings, reduced OTA commission costs and a unified view of their digital presence.

Running on Microsoft Azure, the platform scales elastically to handle seasonal demand spikes and provides the reliability that accommodation providers depend on. Litchi Hospitality now offers tiered service packages spanning social media management, OTA optimisation and the booking engine itself, all powered by the technology foundation Vulcan Labs built.

• Next.js
• React
• TypeScript
• Microsoft Azure
• NightsBridge
• Semper
• RMS Cloud