Azure Private Hire

The brief

Azure Private Hire is a taxi and private hire company working across Stoke on Trent, Newcastle under Lyme and the wider UK. Their existing website looked dated and its Google Maps integration had broken, so quotes were not working properly. We talked through patching it against replacing it, and the client decided to rebuild from scratch.

What I built

The centre of the new site is a booking portal that answers the only question a customer actually has, which is what the journey will cost. They enter a pick up point and destination, choose a date, time and passenger count, and get a quote immediately. From there the same flow carries them through to payment by Stripe, so a booking is made and paid for without leaving the site or waiting for a callback.

Fares are calculated automatically rather than typed in by staff, which is what makes an instant quote possible at all. Journeys between known postcodes are priced at fixed rates, and anything outside that is priced from the route itself. Google Maps handles both location selection and the route itself, replacing the integration that had failed on the old site.

Telephone booking still works exactly as before. A private hire firm cannot afford to lose the customer who prefers to call, so the portal was built as an additional front door rather than a replacement for the office.

How it works

Laravel with Blade templates and MySQL, Stripe for payments and Google Maps for places and routing. The site also presents the parts of the business that win trust: a fleet covering saloon, executive, wheelchair accessible and pet friendly vehicles along with seven and eight seaters, the council inspection regime the vehicles go through, and the company's Best Private Vehicle Hire Company 2022 and Best Airport Transfers Service 2023 awards.

My role

Freelance and solo, about two months. Frontend, backend, payments and the maps and fare work were all mine.