Spiti Greece

The Problem

Spiti Greece is a family business with two houses on Samos: a rebuilt eighteenth-century smithy in Kokkari, and a second under construction in the village above it. They let directly, one party at a time, and refuse the booking platforms. That costs them the platform's plumbing. No calendar, no enquiry flow, no price a guest can see. Two domains for two houses, and nothing that read as one family. And the audience is three audiences: Dutch, English and Greek, all first-class.

What It Does

One site on spitigreece.com covering both houses, each language served as real static HTML under /nl/, /en/ and /el/. The slugs are identical across languages, so the switcher keeps you on the page you were reading.

Guests see live availability, a per-night price under every date, and send an enquiry. An enquiry is not a booking: the owner accepts it in the admin panel, which blocks the dates and opens a pre-written mail in the guest's language, from the owner's own mail client so it lands in Sent Items.

There is an island guide. The public half sits on the page; the half with the family's own addresses lives in the database and only crosses the wire once a guest key checks out. Keys read R9NK-2497 and use no ambiguous characters, so you can spell one down the phone.

The hard part

Three languages, none of them an afterthought. Dutch, English and Greek each had to read as the original rather than as a translation of one, and the switcher has to leave a guest on the page they were already reading. Dutch is the source, and anything left untranslated is caught before the site goes out instead of reaching a guest as a blank space.

The other constraint was that the family runs this themselves, between guests, usually from a phone. Prices, availability, blocked dates and the local recommendations all live somewhere they can change without calling me. Refusing the booking platforms means they keep the guest relationship, so the software had to hand them the decisions rather than make those decisions for them.

Everything is backed up weekly. Running costs come to the domains.

Where It Stands

Live, and early. The site is up in all three languages, with the calendar, the enquiry flow and the admin panel working, and the family already setting their own prices and availability. Some of the content is still example copy and the legal pages carry a visible draft notice until a lawyer has read them. Both are things the owner changes from the panel, with no deploy needed. The second house is still a building site, taking names for when it opens.

What is done is the part that is hard to change later: the content model, the language fallback, the database, the backups, and a panel the owner can run from a phone.