Thailand Mountain Trail
A trekking and trail running company in northern Thailand. I took their site back from a developer who had hidden a kill switch in it, rebuilt it, and built the booking system that runs the business.
I found a kill switch.
The old site ran on a heavily tweaked Flatsome theme with UX Builder, and that setup had a security hole. While going through it I found something worse: the previous developer had hidden a plugin on the site that worked as a kill switch. If the client ever stopped paying, it could take the whole website down.
They had also hidden themselves as an admin, so their account didn’t show up in the user list. I deleted the kill switch, removed every trace of it and took out the hidden admin. The website belongs to the client now, not the developer.
I never do this.
Some developers hide a kill switch so they can delete your website if you don’t pay more. It’s not cool, and I’ve had to save a few clients’ sites from it. Everything I build is yours: the code, the data and the admin login.
Off Flatsome, onto Elementor.
I moved the whole site off Flatsome onto the lightweight Hello theme with Elementor Pro’s Theme Builder. A new header with a mega menu of trip cards, 19 trip pages with photo heroes and day-by-day itineraries, a new blog, and one design system across every page.
Everything is editable in Elementor, so their team can update a trip without calling me.
Software built around their trips.
Booking plugins are made for salons and appointments, not multi-day treks with guides, groups and deposits. So I built the plugins that run their whole booking process, from the first inquiry to the trailhead.
Inquiry to trail, one pipeline
Every inquiry moves through approve, hold, deny or offer a similar trip, then deposit, trip details and a booking number.
Payments that make sense
PayPal, bank transfer or cash at the shop through WooCommerce, with deposits and balances tracked separately.
Emails in three languages
21 email templates in English, French and German, with merge tags, scheduled sends and reminders before the trip.
Trip PDFs, sent for them
The right itinerary PDF goes out automatically, in the customer’s language.
Google Calendar sync
Departures and guide briefings land on the team’s calendar on their own.
Staff tools
A page per departure with a tab for each customer, editable rosters, pick-ups and guides, overdue inquiry alerts and one-click test bookings.
Public trip calendar
Upcoming departures and open spots, with no personal data on show.
Staff calendar
Every booking with contact and payment details. Cancel, reschedule, add notes or assign guides right from the calendar.
Date picker on every trip page
Pick a free day or join a group that is already going, and the inquiry form opens with the trip and dates filled in.
Smart group capacity
Groups can share days on the trail as long as every day of the trip has room for one more.
Trip page widgets
A set of Elementor widgets for the trip pages: hero, day-by-day itinerary and booking card.
$800+ a year saved
Recreating this with off-the-shelf tools meant Gravity Forms, Gravity Flow and a stack of paid add-ons, and it still could not do what they needed.
Let's build your monopoly.
Send an invite on Upwork with your goals and I’ll reply with a plan.