Darren Cromer

Fully Booked is a booking platform for UK minibus and coach hire and the job-sharing network of operators behind it. A customer describes a trip once on the customer website and receives offers from the operators who can serve it, ranked with reviews and vehicle photos, then books with a small protected deposit. An operator who cannot take a job refers the customer from the app, and earns a share when another firm in the network carries it. Around that loop sit quotations, cancellations, Get Covered, partner contacts, stored bookings, a wallet, business pages and the Prebooked widget, all on one backend and run from an admin control room.

GB

Contract

Remote

7

5.0

The customer side of Fully Booked. A customer who comes to the site directly, or through an operator's referral, fills in one form, receives offers from operators in the area with reviews and vehicle photos, chats without exposing contact details, and books with a small deposit that is held until the trip goes ahead. Every operator also has a business page where customers can book them directly and come back for the next trip.

GB

Contract

Remote

7

5.0

The control room of the Fully Booked network. The founder vets new operators before they can quote, approves offer templates and vehicle photos, moderates conversations and reviews, and traces every booking, cover, referral, payment and payout. Fees, limits and each operator's permissions are settings, and the dashboard works from a phone as well as a desktop.

GB

Contract

Remote

7

5.0

Fully Booked ran on managed cloud infrastructure with a bill that grew every month and a stack nobody fully owned. We moved the whole platform onto a self-hosted Kubernetes cluster without a minute of downtime for the people using it. The cutover covered DNS, ingress, databases and the release pipeline, staged so that traffic shifted only once each layer had been proven on the new cluster. Nobody using the app that week knew anything had happened, which was the point. The recurring bill became owned hardware, and the same cluster now carries the platform's weekly releases.

GB

Contract

Remote

7

5.0

Fully Booked shipped as five Docker services on one DigitalOcean droplet behind Cloudflare, so a very small team could run a marketplace that holds deposits. One repository built every image, a compose file and a Makefile reduced a release to pull, build and up, a Caddy proxy handled certificates and security headers, and Playwright rendered every quote and invoice PDF on the server. Because the services were independent from the start, they later moved to a self-hosted Kubernetes cluster without a rebuild.

GB

Contract

Remote

7

5.0

The Fully Booked operator app reached the App Store and Google Play and keeps passing review, so UK minibus operators can run their business from their phone. The listings sell the business case one benefit per screenshot, compliance is built into the product with in-app account deletion and privacy declarations that match what the app collects, links open the app directly, and releases are staged so an update never breaks an operator's working day.

GB

Contract

Remote

7

5.0

Prebooked is an embeddable booking widget, published on npm, that puts Fully Booked's enquiry form, messenger and quote flow on any operator website, from WordPress and Elementor to React and plain HTML. Enquiries land in the operator's app as direct customers, and a small fee applies only when a trip is booked.

GB

Contract

Remote

7

5.0

A promotional video that walks a UK minibus operator through Fully Booked's benefits in the order they matter, made from the real app rather than stock footage. It opens on the operator's own problem, gives each benefit one beat on a real screen, and was cut to several lengths, from a few-second hook for social feeds to a full version for landing pages and the store listings.

GB

Contract

Remote

7

5.0

Store screenshots, a feature graphic, an app icon and email art, made in Photoshop from real screens so a young platform looks established to operators. The screenshots tell the pitch in five swipes at every size Apple and Google require, every email opens with its own illustration in the brand colours, and the icon and splash screens carry the logo of two hands meeting.

GB

Contract

Remote

7

5.0

Every Fully Booked screen began as a sketch the founder approved before any code was paid for, and each answers an operator's or a customer's problem. The operator home screen became a menu of income, Get Covered kept the order of its hand-drawn flow, quotes and cancellation letters came from the founder's own wording, and the admin grew from five wireframed tabs into the network's control room. The MVP's screens were designed by another designer at Webanion; I redesigned phases 2, 3 and 4 myself in Figma, working from these flows.

GB

Contract

Remote

7

5.0

Each phase of Fully Booked was wired as a clickable Figma prototype, so the founder could try it, question it and approve it before paying for it to be built. Three files, for the app, the customer website and the admin, share one set of styles and components, and the documents operators send are prototyped with the tap that sends them. Developers built from finished frames rather than guesses, and each phase stayed on scope. The MVP was designed by another designer at Webanion; the redesign in phases 2, 3 and 4 is my own.

GB

Contract

Remote

7

5.0

Six advertisements, each selling one Fully Booked benefit to UK minibus and coach operators, built in Canva from real app screens. Converting enquiries, a booking hub on the operator's own website, quotes in seconds, every booking in one place, cover from trusted partners, and paying only per booking: one promise per ad, one shared look, and components that make the next ad a matter of minutes. The same visuals went on to power the promotional video.

GB

Contract

Remote

7

5.0