Local Buddy Travel

The problem

A tourism business in Sicily offering excursions, car rental and airport transfers needed a site for both foreign and Italian tourists. The client wanted to update tours and cars on their own, and to receive bookings without running a backend.

What I built

I was the only developer. The site is bilingual (Italian and English) and includes:

• A home page made of sections: hero, about, experiences, car rental, airport transfers and a call to action.

• An experiences grid with filters, and detail pages for experiences and cars.

• A booking form that builds a prefilled message and opens WhatsApp, plus a contact modal with the same logic.

Interesting decisions

• Google Sheets as a CMS. Tours, cars, images and translations live in one spreadsheet. The server reads it with a read-only service account and turns it into typed objects, so the client updates the site by editing the sheet.

• In-memory cache. Each range read is cached for five minutes to stay within the Google API quotas.

• Translations from the sheet. A locale route and a React context handle the language.

• WhatsApp instead of a booking backend. The message is generated on the client. It is a pragmatic choice for an audience already used to WhatsApp.