IYT School Management and Booking Platform
International Yacht Training (IYT) is one of the world’s largest sailing certification bodies, with affiliated schools operating from the Mediterranean to the Caribbean. I designed and built a custom web application to give those schools one place to run their operations: course bookings, student records, international payments, and the admin behind all of it. Here is how it came together and what it does.
Project Overview
- Project: IYT School Management and Booking Platform
- Industry: Maritime education and sailing certification
- Client: International Yacht Training Worldwide
- Project type: Custom web application, full build
- My role: Sole designer and builder, from design through to deployment
- Stack: Built with Claude Code, hosted on Vercel, Neon (Postgres) database, Stripe for payments
- Status: Live and in production
The Problem: How Most Sailing Schools Manage Bookings
Most sailing schools run their operations on tools that were never built for the job. A Gmail inbox for student inquiries. A spreadsheet for course dates. A second spreadsheet for who has paid. A third for instructor and vessel scheduling. It works, right up until it doesn’t. When a school is taking bookings from students across three different time zones, that patchwork starts to crack.
IYT schools operate all over the world, which only multiplies the problem. Inverted seasons between the northern and southern hemispheres. Deposits coming in from students in different currencies. Instructor and vessel scheduling that has nothing in common with booking a hotel room. Off-the-shelf booking software cannot handle any of it well, because it was built for a different kind of business. These schools needed a system designed around how a sailing school actually works.
What I Built: A Complete Sailing School Management System
I built a custom web application from the ground up to handle the full lifecycle of a sailing school’s operations. Rather than a thin booking widget bolted onto a website, it is a working back office for a school.
Booking and Course Scheduling
Students browse and book courses, and schools manage course dates, capacity, instructors, and vessels from one place. The scheduling was built around the realities of teaching on the water, including the seasonal differences between regions that a generic calendar tool never accounts for.
Student Management
Every student has a central record, so a school is no longer reconstructing someone’s history from old email threads. Contact details, course history, and notes all live in one system instead of scattered across inboxes and files.
International Payments with Stripe
Payments run on Stripe, which matters enormously for an international operation. The platform takes course deposits and full payments in multiple currencies, so a school collecting a deposit from a student in euros and a balance from another in US dollars is no longer juggling invoices and manual currency math. If Stripe can do it, the platform can do it.
School Administration and Reporting
Behind the student-facing side is a back office for the people actually running the school: managing enrolments, tracking payments, and handling the daily admin that used to live across several spreadsheets.
The goal throughout was consolidation. Instead of stitching together a free inbox, a stack of spreadsheets, and a generic booking plugin, a school runs everything through one system that was designed around its work.
The Result: A Live, Production Web Application
The platform is live in production. It is a full custom web application, designed and built end to end, deployed on Vercel, and handling real payments through Stripe.
Most freelance web designers stop at a theme and a contact form. This was a different kind of build. If your project needs more than a brochure site, a booking flow, a payment system, custom functionality that has to actually work at scale, this is the kind of work I take on.
A Look at the Platform
A walk through the platform in use, from the school dashboard to the student booking flow and Stripe checkout.
Need a Custom Website or Booking System?
Most freelancers build websites. I build the systems that sit behind them too. If your project needs custom functionality, a booking platform, or payment flows that off-the-shelf plugins cannot handle, get in touch.