HILLCRAFT

What we would build for a farm, farm stay and workshops

Stays, tastings and workshops booked on your own site. Guests find the track. The family runs it from a phone.

We build a complete system for a working farm that hosts people: a booking engine for rooms, tastings and workshops with a card deposit, a storefront for your oil, honey and preserves, confirmations by WhatsApp and email with directions, and a native iPhone app for the family. Built from the ground up and owned by you.

Built and delivered remotely from Cheshire, UK · fixed price agreed up front

What goes wrong today

Everything is booked over WhatsApp

A family asks about a weekend, you check a wall calendar, they ask about the olive-harvest workshop too, and three messages later nobody is sure what was agreed. Most farm stays we looked at have no calendar on their site at all.

Deposits by bank transfer, or not at all

A UK guest is asked for a transfer to a Turkish account, gives up, and books a hotel instead. A card deposit at booking, in pounds or lira, keeps the weekend.

Guests cannot find the gate

The last two kilometres are a track with no name, and every arrival is a phone call. A confirmation with the exact pin in Apple Maps and the gate instructions ends that.

The produce only sells at the gate

Guests love the oil, go home, and cannot buy it again. A storefront in your brand, with UK shipping, turns a weekend into a customer.

What we build for you, from the ground up

  1. A booking engine for rooms, tastings and workshops

    Real availability per room and per workshop with capacity, a hold while the guest decides, a card deposit, and overlap checks inside a transaction so a room is never sold twice. The engine behind The Buxton Barber, reshaped for a farm.

  2. Confirmations with directions

    WhatsApp and email confirmations with the pin, the track photos, the gate instructions and what to bring, sent by a job queue that retries until delivered. Reminders before arrival.

  3. A storefront for the produce

    Oil, honey, preserves and gift boxes sold from a storefront built from scratch with Apple Pay, UK cards and shipping by weight, plus a seasonal pre-order for the new harvest. No marketplace fee.

  4. Changeovers and cleaning

    Departures and arrivals become a changeover list for whoever cleans, with a tick per room and a photo when it is ready.

  5. Workshops with capacity and kit

    A cheese-making morning has eight places and needs eight aprons and eight moulds. Capacity closes the booking; a kit list from the stock ledger makes sure the moulds are there.

  6. Gift vouchers

    A stay or a tasting as a voucher bought online, redeemed against a booking, validated on the server so it cannot be used twice.

  7. Invoices, expenses and tax

    Bookings and shop orders become invoices, feed and fuel become expenses, and a tax set-aside runs automatically, from Hillcraft Finance, the system Hillcraft runs itself.

  8. A native iPhone app for the family

    Arrivals today, workshops this week, shop orders to pack and who has paid, in a Swift app with Face ID and a role for each family member.

The Apple layer your guests actually notice

Arrival day on the lock screen

The guest's iPhone shows a Live Activity on arrival day: check-in from three, the gate code, and a tap to open the track in Apple Maps, using the same iOS 27 technology Hillcraft Finance ships today.

A stay pass in Apple Wallet

The booking as a Wallet pass with dates, the farm pinned in Apple Maps, the gate instructions on the back and a reminder the day before travel.

A QR at the market stall

Scan the sign on your stall and the next tasting opens as an App Clip with Apple Pay ready, no download, and the shopper books before they have finished the sample.

Reminders and calendar

Workshops drop into the guest's calendar from the confirmation; the family gets a reminder for each changeover.

Apple Pay for deposits and the shop

Two taps for a deposit or a bottle, through your own payment account, in pounds or lira.

Payments in Türkiye, done properly

Deposits, balances and shop orders go through your own account: iyzico, PayTR or your bank's virtual POS in Türkiye, Stripe or your existing provider in the UK. Stripe is not available in Türkiye, which is why the checkout is built to your provider. Hillcraft never holds your money; the provider's confirmed status is written to the booking or order the moment it lands.

Built and running: the examples this comes from

Questions we get asked

We also list on Airbnb. Will the calendars clash?

No. The engine reads the Airbnb iCal block and writes yours back, so a room booked on either side closes on both. Direct bookings carry no platform fee.

Can UK guests pay in pounds?

Yes. Prices are held per currency and the checkout uses the provider for that market, so a UK guest sees pounds and pays by card or Apple Pay without a transfer.

What does it cost?

Fixed price agreed up front for the whole system after a video call about your rooms, workshops and produce. No commission on bookings.

Signal is weak at the farm. Does the app cope?

The family app caches today's list and queues changes until the signal returns, and confirmations go out from the server, not from your phone.

Who owns the system?

You do: code, data, guest list and accounts, on your own domain and your own payment provider.

Tell us what a weekend at the farm looks like.

Send us your rooms, your workshops and how guests book today. We reply with a plain description of the booking engine, the shop and the family app we would build, delivered remotely from Cheshire with a video call whenever you want one.

More sectors