Work

Rachael's Rentals is a golf cart rental operation on Water Island. They had been using an off-the-shelf rental platform sold to them by a third-party company. Slow page loads, confusing UI, and an admin interface that made tasks tedious.

It used to be a pain for customers to work with the business, which is ridiculous when a customer WANTS to give you their money, but your system barely works to take it. The new version has received significant reformatting and optimizations. Check availability, pick a cart, pay. It works on a phone, which matters because most of their customers are booking while traveling; especially with poor cell service!

The admin side is where most of the work went. This required a completely fresh unit management system, developed completely from scratch; no templates were used due to the niche nature of the requirements. The dashboard shows the schedule in various formats, lets staff manage reservations and walk-ins, and handles swaps when a cart needs to come out of rotation for maintenance, among numerous other features.

The system tracks individual vehicles rather than treating inventory as interchangeable units, which is something most general-purpose rental platforms don't do. It matters here because each cart has its own history of maintenance and other quirks that staff need to know about.

Before, they were managing customer communication through a personal Gmail account. Now there's a complete email system built into the platform: automated confirmations and reminders go out on their own, and staff have an inbox at their own domain (contact@rachaelsrentals.com) instead of one ending in "@gmail.com". It's the kind of thing that looks obvious in retrospect but makes a real difference in how professional the operation feels to customers.