In 2017, Staycation ventured into the local tourism sector, offering Parisians the opportunity to rediscover their city for a weekend by occupying unsold hotel rooms in their neighborhoods. As CTO, Pierrick established the entire reservation infrastructure and web & mobile applications. Arthur developed the mobile app. By making use of hotel facilities (pool, spa, restaurant) and creating tailor-made experiences for its customers (mixology classes, horseback riding, massages), Staycation quickly became a popular brand among city dwellers throughout France.

Challenges

The initial Staycation platform did not allow multi-day bookings, so upon Pierrick's arrival, he had to rebuild the web application from scratch to enable the company to expand more widely.

Once the platform's success was well-established, two strategic priorities emerged: handling high traffic (5,000+ users, and up to 35,000) and ensuring optimal search engine rankings.

Finally, as Staycation became a significant player in luxury hospitality, the need for automated availability management required backend integration with hotel infrastructures (channel managers).

In parallel, the role of the CTO demanded strong interpersonal skills to manage the tech team and coordinate various departments (product, design, marketing, sales).

As Staycation was a self-funded startup and the tech job market was extremely competitive, recruitment was a significant part of the CTO's responsibilities. Pragmatism, technical expertise, and execution speed were essential values to deliver product iterations rapidly, with a high level of quality, all geared towards the company's development.

Features and Technology

🏨️ Reservation system (cart, payment) and real-time availability management: as inventory was very limited, overbooking was not an option

🔍️ SEO and search engine optimization: 30% organic traffic

🏋️ Load management: up to 35,000 simultaneous users eagerly awaited the weekly sales opening every Wednesday morning

🔗️ Interface with hotel infrastructures for availability management

✏️ Content creation optimization to minimize manual tasks for the marketing team

• The web application is developed in React, Typescript, Redux.

• The mobile application is entirely built in React Native, allowing deployment on iOS and Android with a single codebase.

• It relies on a Scala Play2! API.

Result

• Upon his arrival, Pierrick released a complete web application in 2 months.

• In 3 months, Pierrick and Arthur delivered the mobile application.

• In 2 years, Staycation's revenue increased 12-fold, making the self-funded company one of the most promising players in the Parisian market.

• Efforts to improve platform stability and handle high traffic resulted in a prime-time broadcast on M6 (one of the biggest french TV channels).