Clover Creek Guest House

Clover Creek Guest House is a farmhouse cottage on a working farm in Rush Valley, about an hour west of Salt Lake City. It sleeps six, takes dogs, and sits close enough to the Pony Express Trail and the Onaqui wild horses that most guests are using it as a basecamp for something.

Like most small rentals, it lived on the big listing platforms. That works, and every booking gives up a cut of the nightly rate. Worse than the fee, though, is what the platform keeps: the guest. Repeat visitors come back through the platform and pay the fee again. The property has no list of its own, no way to answer a question before someone books, and no page that shows up when a person searches for a place to stay near Tooele County.

The owner wanted a site the business owned: one that could take a reservation and a payment directly, without giving up the channels that already worked.

I built the site from scratch, front end to back end, including the admin tools behind it. The public side is a real booking flow: a guest picks dates on a live availability calendar that shows which nights are priced higher, sets how many guests and dogs are coming, agrees to the house rules, and pays through Stripe. Cleaning fee and taxes are folded into the number they see, because a surprise at checkout is how you lose a booking.

Behind that sits the piece that makes direct booking safe to do at all: the calendar syncs both ways with the property’s Airbnb and VRBO listings and with Google Calendar. A night booked anywhere blocks everywhere. Double-booking a single-cottage property is not a minor bug — it’s the one failure a guest never forgives — so this was the part I spent the most care on.

Around the booking flow, the rest of what a lodging business needs:

• Guest messaging built into the site, so questions before and during a stay don’t scatter across text messages and three platform inboxes.
• An owner dashboard for managing reservations and editing site content directly, with no developer in the loop to change a rate or fix a typo.
• A photo gallery and a reviews page, so the proof lives on the property’s own domain instead of only on a platform profile.
• An FAQ and house-rules page that answers the check-in, pet-policy, and what-is-in-the-kitchen questions before someone has to ask.

Clover Creek now takes reservations and payments directly, under its own name, at clovercreekguesthouse.com, while its Airbnb and VRBO listings keep running in parallel without conflicting. Guests who find the property directly cost nothing in platform fees. Guests who arrive through a platform can still be pointed back to a site that answers their questions.

The owner can see and change everything without calling me. Not every site needs a dashboard like this one, but every site I build is meant to keep running properly without needing me. I still maintain Clover Creek, and it’s the project I point small-business owners to first.