The Challenge: From Phone Calls to a Scalable Rental Engine

RiverCity Bike Rentals was stuck in a painful loop: every inquiry came through phone calls and scattered WhatsApp messages. No availability visibility. No dynamic pricing. No way to manage multiple vehicle owners submitting their fleets. The team was drowning in manual work and losing bookings to slower competitors. They needed a modern platform that could scale from 20 vehicles to 200 while keeping the concierge experience that made them special.

The Solution: A Full-Stack Rental Intelligence System

We built a comprehensive platform combining a customer-facing booking engine with an admin control center and partner marketplace. The system automatically calculates best-rate pricing across daily/weekly/monthly tiers, surfaces 'Lucky Day Bonus' savings to riders, manages partner vehicle submissions with admin approval workflows, and processes payouts to vehicle owners—all without manual intervention.

Smart Booking Engine: Three-step intake form that auto-qualifies riders, checks real-time availability across 40+ vehicles, and calculates the optimal pricing tier automatically. No back-and-forth emails.
Dynamic Pricing Intelligence: Automatic best-rate selection comparing daily vs. weekly vs. monthly pricing, with visible 'Lucky Day Bonus' savings highlighted for transparency and urgency.
Partner Marketplace: Vehicle owners submit their bikes and cars for admin approval. Supabase row-level security ensures owners only see their own inventory, payouts, and availability blocks.
Availability Ledger: Real-time booking blocks respect vehicle status, owner-defined blackout dates, and active/inactive listing toggles. Customers never see unavailable vehicles.
Payout Automation: Booking completions trigger payout calculations in the ledger with manual payment reference tracking. Owners know exactly what they're earning and when.
Content Management: The RiverCity team publishes travel guides, destination tips, and rental stories directly through a React Quill-powered dashboard. Blog posts link back to rental offers, creating a content-to-conversion funnel.
Admin Dashboard: Full CRUD for vehicles, availability, payouts, and bookings. Invite vehicle partners, track earnings, and manage the entire rental operation from one place.

Technology Stack

Built with React 18 + Vite for snappy UI updates, Tailwind CSS for responsive design across all devices, and Supabase for the entire backend: PostgreSQL database with row-level security, real-time subscriptions, file storage for vehicle images, and serverless functions for custom logic like availability checks and payout creation.

Frontend: React 18.2, Vite 4.4.5, Tailwind CSS 3.3.3, Radix UI components, Framer Motion for animations
Backend: Supabase (Auth, PostgreSQL, RLS, Storage, Functions), Serverless RPC functions for `get_vehicle_availability`, `create_booking`, `approve_vehicle_listing`
CMS: React Quill 2.0 for rich content editing, blog post publishing with slug generation, featured image uploads
Maps & Location: Leaflet 1.9.4 + React Leaflet 4.2.1 for interactive location discovery
Utilities: Date-fns for duration-aware calculations, React Context for auth state, DOM Purify for XSS protection

Results: From Chaos to Predictable Growth

In the first 30 days, the platform drove 40 qualified leads—a 5x jump from the monthly phone inquiry baseline. Confirmed bookings doubled because riders could self-serve instantly instead of waiting for call-backs. Staff went from fielding calls all day to managing concierge follow-ups and vehicle maintenance. Response time dropped from 12+ hours to under 60 seconds. The partner marketplace is now live with vehicle owners from Haiphong and neighboring cities able to list, track earnings, and automate payouts—expanding the fleet without hiring more staff.

The business is no longer bottlenecked by availability or pricing questions. Every booking is intelligent, every payout is automated, and every owner knows exactly what they're earning. The content engine feeds the SEO funnel while the booking system closes at conversion. What started as a 'website project' became a scalable SaaS-style operation for the rental business.