Travel technology · Partner since 2018
Nice2stay
Rebuilding the booking experience behind a curated marketplace of high-end villas and distinctive places to stay.
The challenge
A beautiful collection of stays trapped inside an unreliable booking experience.
Nice2stay is an online travel marketplace for handpicked high-end villas, holiday homes and bed-and-breakfasts. The quality of the collection was the proposition, but in 2018 the customer application was getting in its way.
Performance was slow. Price calculations could be unreliable. Search made it difficult to surface the right property, and the overall experience had become frustrating to use and hard to extend. The business needed a rebuild that could improve the customer journey immediately while supporting the much more complicated rules operating underneath a travel marketplace.
Tech architecture
Rails at the core. A faster experience at the edge.
DevDen rebuilt the platform with a Rails backend and Vue frontend, then moved the customer-facing application to Nuxt to improve server rendering, performance and search visibility.
- Ruby on Rails
- Vue
- Nuxt
- Elasticsearch
- PostgreSQL
- Dynamic maps
- 01Search that understands inventory
Elasticsearch made it possible to navigate a growing catalogue using the filters and combinations travellers actually need.
- 02Maps built into discovery
Dynamic maps connected location and availability to the browsing experience without turning the interface into a list of pins.
- 03Pricing with real-world rules
Complex rates, stay requirements and availability needed dependable calculations across the booking journey.
The partner product
Customer growth required better tools for property partners too.
The work expanded beyond the public booking experience. DevDen also rebuilt the partner CRM used by property owners and managers to maintain listings, handle reservation requests and bookings, and keep availability accurate.
Building both sides of the marketplace with the same 3–4 person team created a useful feedback loop. A change to pricing, availability or booking logic was considered across the traveller experience, partner workflow and Rails backend together—not handed between disconnected vendors.
Impact
From a few thousand bookings a year to tens of thousands.
The new foundation supported Nice2stay as annual bookings grew from a few thousand to tens of thousands. Search, maps, pricing, content and partner operations became parts of one coherent product rather than separate technical problems.
DevDen continues to own and maintain the technology in 2026. That continuity means new work begins with years of context: how the marketplace behaves, where operational complexity lives, and what both travellers and partners expect from it.
“I have been working with the team at DevDen for six years. I work with their team day in and day out to advance the Nice2stay platform. They have met high-pressure deadlines and created work for us on a product that has thousands of daily unique visitors. They’re easy to get in touch with and quick to follow up and resolve any issues. It has been a great experience to work with the team at DevDen.”
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