Kalamazoo City Centre

Starting point

The challenge

Kalamazoo City Centre rents its space for weddings, receptions, corporate events and community gatherings. Every booking starts with the same question: is that date open? Without a system holding availability, that answer lives with whoever is nearest the calendar, and each inquiry turns into a chain of messages before anyone knows whether there is anything to discuss.

What we set out to do

Goals

• Let someone planning an event in Southwest Michigan check a date and send a real inquiry without waiting on a phone call back
• Keep one authoritative calendar so the public site and the venue team can never disagree about whether a date is open
• Give the venue an admin dashboard that handles inquiries, appointments and confirmed events in one place
• Make booking a tour or walkthrough self-serve, so scheduling stops eating staff time
• Present the room the way a venue is actually chosen — on look and feel — without slowing the booking flow down

Strategy

Approach

The calendar is the product. Availability, holds, scheduled appointments and confirmed events are modelled as one dataset, and two interfaces are built onto it: a public booking flow for people who want a date, and an admin dashboard for the people who own the room. Because both read the same records, a date taken in the dashboard disappears from the site immediately. There is no sync step and no window where two parties can claim the same evening.

Design decisions

• The interface uses hand-drawn linework and illustration rather than stock venue photography and glass cards. A venue is chosen on character, and the site is allowed to have some.
• The booking flow asks for the date first. Date is the disqualifier — everything else is wasted effort if the day is gone — so it comes before event type, headcount and contact details.
• Unavailable dates are shown as unavailable instead of quietly hidden. Seeing that a Saturday is booked is useful information; a date that simply is not there reads like a broken calendar.
• The admin dashboard is designed for a phone as seriously as a desktop, because venue staff answer questions while standing in the room, not at a desk.
• Motion is used to keep the booking flow feeling continuous between steps, and kept off the calendar itself, where speed and legibility matter more than transitions.

Features

What we built

• Public booking flow — date selection, event type, headcount and contact details — submitted as a structured inquiry rather than a free-text email
• Appointment scheduling so prospective clients can book a tour or walkthrough against real staff availability
• Calendar-driven event management, where holds, appointments and confirmed events all live on a single source of truth
• Authenticated admin dashboard for reviewing inquiries, confirming or declining dates, rescheduling, and keeping notes against each event record
• Availability controls — blackout dates and turnaround time between events — managed by the venue instead of hard-coded
• Event detail records that carry an inquiry through to a confirmed booking without anyone re-entering the information
• Venue pages covering the space, capacity and event types, written to answer the questions that otherwise arrive as first emails
• Server-rendered pages with structured venue and event data, so search engines and AI assistants can read what the space is and what it hosts

Technology

Where it landed

Outcome

Kalamazoo City Centre now runs on one system. The public booking flow, the appointment scheduler and the staff dashboard all read the same calendar, so availability shown to a visitor is the availability the venue actually has. Inquiries arrive as records the team can act on, tours book themselves, and the venue manages its own dates without a developer in the loop.