Central Yacht Agency
A legacy yacht charter platform, rebuilt while it kept running.
- CLIENT
- Central Yacht Agency
- YEAR
- 2024
- OUR ROLE
- Architecture, API, AI search, data migration, broker portal, mobile app
- TECHNOLOGIES
- Laravel 11, FastAPI, MongoDB Atlas
01 / Overview
Central Yacht Agency runs one of the established platforms in luxury yacht charter brokerage: yacht listings, rates, availability and bookings for brokers and central agents worldwide. The original system was a PHP application with XML feeds, built up over many years, that partners and brokers depended on every day.
02 / The challenge
Replace the entire platform without a single day of downtime. Thousands of yachts, rates, calendars and user accounts had to move to a new data model, and every partner integration that read the old XML feeds had to keep working. On top of that, search had to stop being a wall of dropdowns: a client asking for “a large catamaran in the Greek islands with a jacuzzi for ten” should get exactly that.
03 / What we built
Search in plain language
A language model turns the request into structured filters while an embedding captures its meaning, both in parallel. MongoDB Atlas Vector Search finds semantically similar yachts, hard constraints and real availability are applied on top, and business rules re-rank the result. If nothing matches, the search relaxes its criteria in three passes rather than returning an empty page.
Migration without downtime
A dedicated migration layer pulled users, yachts, rates, calendars and images from the old system, cleaned and reconciled them, and kept both systems in sync through webhooks until the switch. The old XML feeds were rebuilt on the new API, so partners never had to change a line of code.
Bookings, availability and money
Seasons and rates in six currencies and five charter types, a calendar with holds, options, inquiries and boat-show blocks, deposit schedules, commissions and financial dashboards, and a public API with per-client keys for partners who integrate directly.
A broker app that works offline
On iOS and Android, brokers search, shortlist and compare yachts on their phone, save a library that works with no signal at boat shows, and send clients a branded e-brochure by WhatsApp, SMS or email, choosing what to show: price, contact details or neither.
04 / Results
The business moved from a 20-year-old codebase to a platform it can keep building on: three applications (broker portal, API, iOS and Android app) on one data model, clients searching in plain language, partners still connected, and a public API that turns the platform into a product other companies build on.