The challenge
Customers looking for a houseboat holiday in Italy want to know one thing first: what’s available for my dates? Until now, the answer required an email exchange. That’s fine at low volume, but it’s a barrier to converting visitors who are just browsing and comparing options.
The catch: the three suppliers powering the site — LeBoat, HHI (Andronautic), and Riverly — each run their own separate API, with different authentication, different data formats, and different quirks. There’s no off-the-shelf plugin or aggregation tool that covers all three. The only path was building the integration from scratch.
The approach: vibe coding
This was built entirely through vibe coding — describing the requirements in plain language and using Claude (Anthropic’s AI) to generate the code, then testing against the real APIs and iterating from there. No external developers, no agency, no lengthy build cycle.
Vibe coding isn’t just asking an AI to write code. It still requires proper systems thinking: mapping the user journey, deciding on the data model, identifying edge cases, and being able to read the output critically when something breaks. What it removes is the friction between having a clear idea and having working code in front of you.
For someone with a background in product management rather than software development, this approach allows for building things that simply wouldn’t be possible otherwise — at least not without significant cost and time.
How it works
The core of the system is an n8n workflow that acts as a broker between the WordPress front-end and the three supplier APIs. When a visitor searches — selecting a region and travel dates — the search widget sends a request to an n8n webhook, which fans out to all three APIs in parallel, normalises the responses into a consistent structure, and returns a merged list of available boats.
Results are displayed as cards showing the boat name, pricing (in European “from X € excl. extras” format), a floor plan tag where available, and a one-way trip indicator. The widget auto-fills from URL parameters, so linking directly to a specific search works out of the box.
The result
Visitors to the site can now search live availability across all three providers from a single search form, without contacting the business first. The search engine is embedded directly into the website and works on mobile and desktop.
Related Projects
We are always busy trying to build the best user experiences for our clients and their customers. Here are some projects that we are the most proud of.
