--- title: A journey towards SpeakerTravel - Building a service... description: A founder recounts building SpeakerTravel, a service that lets conference organizers book speaker flights within budgets. The story covers researching... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/a-journey-towards-speakertravel---building-a-service-from-scratch-ip2jzl74f twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: A journey towards SpeakerTravel - Building a service from scratch | daily.dev og:description: A founder recounts building SpeakerTravel, a service that lets conference organizers book speaker flights within budgets. The story covers researching... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/a-journey-towards-speakertravel---building-a-service-from-scratch-ip2jzl74f og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/Ip2jzL74f.png og:image:alt: A journey towards SpeakerTravel - Building a service from scratch og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # A journey towards SpeakerTravel - Building a service from scratch **[Maarten Balliauw](https://daily.dev/sources/maartenballiauw)** · 21 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A founder recounts building SpeakerTravel, a service that lets conference organizers book speaker flights within budgets. The story covers researching flight-booking infrastructure (GDS, affiliate APIs, OTAs, and ultimately AllMyles), vetting the business idea with the CENTS framework, navigating legal and payment-gateway restrictions around selling travel, and the technical journey from an abandoned Vue.js/React SPA to a familiar ASP.NET Core MVC + Razor, Entity Framework, SQL Server, and Hangfire stack. It also touches on the domain model (Event, Traveler, Booking, TravelerStatus state machine), the impact of COVID-19 on the business, and future plans including replacing jQuery with HTMX and experimenting with Kubernetes. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### What are the technical steps involved in booking a flight ticket programmatically? Booking a flight ticket involves four steps: searching an inventory of available seats for a flight combination, requesting a price for that combination, creating a booking that reserves the seat, and issuing the actual ticket. Booking must happen soon after pricing (often within 20-30 minutes) or the seat becomes available again; ticket issuance is kept separate so payment can be confirmed first. _daily.dev surfaces engineering write-ups like this for developers designing multi-step booking or reservation systems._ ### What is the CENTS framework for evaluating a side project as a viable business? CENTS is an acronym from The Millionaire Fastlane for vetting business ideas across five dimensions: Control over business elements, Entry difficulty for competitors, Need from real customers, Time decoupled from money (passive income potential), and Scale potential. It offers a quick sanity check rather than a full startup canvas before investing in building a product. _developers weighing side-project ideas can find similar founder frameworks and build stories on daily.dev._ ### Why do payment gateways like Stripe often refuse to support travel booking businesses? Payment gateways commonly classify travel as a 'risky business' category and exclude it from their supported business types, even when a provider initially indicates support, written confirmation can reverse that stance. This forced one travel-booking founder to rely on upfront deposits instead of accepting credit card payments directly through a gateway like Stripe. _founders building payment flows around restricted industries can track these gotchas via daily.dev._ ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Foojay Podcast \#88: From Code to Stage: Organizing Conferences and Finding Your Voice as a Speake](https://daily.dev/posts/foojay-podcast-88-from-code-to-stage-organizing-conferences-and-finding-your-voice-as-a-speake-vuh3p9ud7) · Foojay.io · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [So You Want To Speak At Software Conferences? : dylanbeattie.net](https://daily.dev/posts/so-you-want-to-speak-at-software-conferences-dylanbeattie-net-2gmftuwck) · Hacker News · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Conferences](https://daily.dev/posts/conferences-9o3krpinf) · SivaLabs · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [I Built a SaaS in 30 Days. Here’s Exactly What Happened.](https://daily.dev/posts/i-built-a-saas-in-30-days-here-s-exactly-what-happened--lwkpntyzv) · DEV · 139 upvotes · 18 comments --- Tags: [#startup](https://daily.dev/tags/startup), [#career](https://daily.dev/tags/career), [#aspnetcore](https://daily.dev/tags/aspnetcore) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/a-journey-towards-speakertravel---building-a-service-from-scratch-ip2jzl74f) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"A journey towards SpeakerTravel - Building a service from scratch","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/a-journey-towards-speakertravel---building-a-service-from-scratch-ip2jzl74f","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/a-journey-towards-speakertravel---building-a-service-from-scratch-ip2jzl74f"},"datePublished":"2026-10-04T13:04:26.462Z","dateModified":"2026-10-04T13:06:05.812Z","description":"A founder recounts building SpeakerTravel, a service that lets conference organizers book speaker flights within budgets. 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