The Merchant Hotel, Belfast

What I did for The Merchant Hotel

The Merchant Hotel in Belfast is a five-star property with restaurants, event spaces and suites all running under one brand. The work was a full Craft CMS build for the marketing site, with field-level Avvio integration so live availability and rates surface inside the editorial blocks rather than living in a bolted-on iframe.

What landed:

• A complete Craft CMS site build with Twig templates tuned for the hotel's editorial voice.
• Field-level Avvio integration exposing live availability, rates and room types inside the CMS, so editors compose pages with the booking data woven in rather than dropped on top.
• The wider Fleet Hotels group support (Connemara Coast, Aghadoe Heights, Fleet Hotel Temple Bar) under Windward Management as the parent operator.

How it helped the team

Booking flows in hospitality usually feel bolted on. The hotel does its design language one way and the booking engine cuts across it with its own widget. We wanted bookings to feel native to the brand, not a different product running in the same browser tab. That meant the editorial team needed to see Avvio fields as first-class blocks in the CMS, and the renderer needed to honour the design system even on dates-and-rooms templates.

Why Craft for this

Craft CMS shines when an editorial team has a strong design language and needs the CMS to honour it. Twig templates give clean control over markup, the field model lets you build editor experiences that match the way the team thinks, and the surface area stays small enough that nothing surprising happens in production. Add a non-trivial third-party booking system on top and you are doing real engineering, but the platform is helping rather than fighting you.

How I would describe working together

Windward Management runs a tight group of premium properties. The benefit of the engagement was the same as the Lumeon one, scaled across multiple hotels: one developer who knows all the codebases, who can move a fix from Aghadoe to Connemara without rediscovery, and who treats each property's editorial team as the customer they are. Booking flows had to feel native to the brand, and the UX wrapper around Avvio was where the work was.