What one summer built
From an empty schema to a concierge that takes a booking inside the chat, in ten weeks. The numbers, measured on 29 August 2026.
Lena has been answering guests in Saas-Fee since June. What started as a chat about restaurants now covers the stay: lifts and their timetables, weather including a separate answer to the question about altitude, day plans that read the forecast, events, getting here, the pharmacy, groceries, 2026/27 ski passes — and the booking itself.
The state of it, measured
- 4 interface languages: German, English, French, Italian
- 33 properties in the system, 551 conversations held
- 111 database migrations, 26 API routes, around 33,000 lines of TypeScript
- 1367 automated tests across 74 files, run before every change
Those are measurements taken on 29 August 2026, not a rounded impression. The previous edition of this list was five days old and was wrong about the test count by 65 percent — since then the rule is that a number gets written down only if it can be re-measured with one command or one query.
What was added
The largest addition of the summer is direct booking. Through the apaleo integration a guest sees real rates and availability for their dates, books inside the chat, receives a personal guest link, and can cancel — without leaving the conversation. Guests with nowhere to stay get suggestions through the Booking.com Demand API. One rule holds without exception: we never quote our own price for somebody else's house.
The second block is channels. A table request reaches the restaurant over WhatsApp and the confirmation comes back to the guest. Urgent reports reach the owner or the operations team. Sign-in codes go out as SMS routed to the number's region. Voice messages are transcribed.
The third, and the largest by volume, was not a feature but accuracy: 57 migrations in one month for opening hours per lift line, mountain restaurants, parking priced separately for cars and campers, the SaastalCard as included rather than discounted, wheelchair access, facilities closed for the summer, rainy-day alternatives — and the word forms the search can actually match.
What counts next
Not more features. The two largest files in the project are a third of the codebase between them and are being split; the test net that had to come first grew from 802 to 1367 tests in August. After that: making a breakage visible before a guest reports it. Both will be written up here.