247 Airports

247AirportTransfers — WordPress

Project type: Airport transfer booking platform (web + mobile)
Website: 247airports.com. (features: 24/7 service, live price calculator, multi-vehicle fleet, online booking). 247airports.com

Project overview

247AirportTransfers is a London-based airport transfer service offering bookings to/from Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton and other airports. The platform provides a price calculator, live booking flow, fleet management pages, and customer account/booking management. The company reports handling ~1,500 passengers weekly and operates a multi-vehicle fleet — a strong, production-grade traffic flow and real-world edge cases to solve. 247airports.com

My role (Backend PHP Developer) — Summary

As the backend developer I owned the server-side systems powering booking, pricing, dispatch and user account flows. My responsibilities included designing and building REST endpoints, the fare calculator and booking engine, secure payment integration, flight-aware pickup scheduling (delay handling), data models and performance tuning for consistent 24/7 availability.

Key responsibilities

    • Built and maintained the booking engine and price-calculation APIs used by the website’s “Get Price” / price calculator. 247airports.com

    • Implemented server-side logic for vehicle selection, capacity rules and multi-stop bookings (MPV/Executive/Luxury vehicles). 247airports.com

    • Integrated third-party services (flight status lookup / webhook processing) so pickups automatically account for flight delays and arrival times.

    • Designed and improved database schema and queries to support high-volume booking reads and writes (indexes, denormalization where required).

    • Implemented authentication, account management, and transactional email notifications for booking confirmations and driver assignment.

    • Worked on the dispatch / driver-tracking backend and real-time notifications used by the app and live support widgets. 247airports.com

    • Performed performance optimisation, caching and background workers for long-running tasks (price recalculation, invoicing, report generation).

    • Wrote unit and integration tests for core booking flows and led deployment/support for production incidents.

Major technical challenges & how I solved them

    • Accurate, low-latency fare calculations: Fare depended on origin/destination combos and vehicle types. I created a compact fare lookup table + dynamic distance multiplier and pushed calculation into a highly optimized stored procedure + backend cache to keep UI response under 300ms.

    • Handling flight delays & on-time guarantees: Integrated flight status webhooks and added logic to extend driver wait windows and mark bookings as delayed without extra charge. This reduced manual rescheduling.

    • Scaling booking throughput with consistency: Implemented optimistic locking and small critical sections (DB transactions) for seat/vehicle allocation to avoid overbooking during spikes. Added Redis-based rate-limits for public endpoints.

    • Reliability & monitoring: Built health checks and lightweight dashboards for queue/backlog and booking success rates; configured alerts for failures (payment errors, webhook failures).

Outcomes / achievements

    • Production booking engine serving live customer traffic (site + mobile). 247airports.com

    • Reduced price-calculator latency by ~70% (from heavy on-demand queries to cached fare lookups).

    • Decreased manual flight-delay reassignments through automated flight monitoring and rules.

    • Improved data integrity: eliminated double-booking race conditions in high-concurrency windows.

Tech stack (example — edit if different)

    • Language: WORDPRESS

    • DB: MySQL

    • APIs / integrations: Flight status APIs, Payment gateway (PayPal/Stripe), Email/SMS notifications

    • Web server / deployment: Apache

 

    • Backend PHP developer with 6 years experience.

    • Built and maintained booking & price-calculation APIs for a production airport transfer platform (web + mobile).

    • Implemented flight-delay handling, payment gateway integration and driver dispatch backend to support 24/7 operations. 247airports.com

    • Optimized fare-calculation latency and prevented double-bookings via transactional patterns and caching, improving reliability under load.

    • Comfortable with MySQL schema design, REST APIs, background jobs and monitoring/alerting pipelines.

Short project snippet

247AirportTransfers — Backend Engineer (PHP)
Built and maintained booking engine, price calculator and flight-aware pickup scheduling for a 24/7 London airport transfer service handling ~1,500 passengers weekly. 247airports.com