CrewReview: a travel review platform and mobile app for airline crew

The brief

CrewReview was a small startup with a big idea: a single place for airline crew to find the best restaurants, bars, sights and running routes on their layovers, reviewed by other crew. The founders needed a team that could guide them past the usual pitfalls while making good use of a startup's time and budget.

How we worked

The client already had designs they were happy with, so we built from those with very few changes. Where existing, well-maintained packages could do the job, we recommended them rather than building from scratch, which kept the budget focused on what made CrewReview different.

Early in the build, we set up a test server filled with realistic demo data. That let the founders explore each feature as it was finished and give feedback while changes were still cheap.

What we built

• Destinations in cities across six continents.
• Maps showing restaurants, bars and things to see and do.
• Running, cycling and walking routes for each destination.
• Reviews written by crew, for crew.
• Claimable business listings, with tools for businesses to manage their pages.
• Affiliate sponsorship and bookable tours through third-party providers.
• An admin area built with Laravel Nova.
• A Flutter mobile app, backed by the same Laravel API as the website.

Technology

The platform runs on Laravel with a MySQL 8 database, a Vue.js front end and a Laravel Nova admin area. Payments use Stripe Connect, media is stored on Amazon S3, and servers are managed with Laravel Forge on DigitalOcean.

The outcome

CrewReview.com launched successfully, and the client continued working with us on new features after launch.