Stay In Puglia is a tourism platform dedicated to one of Italy's most loved regions. Travelers use it to find welcoming stays, authentic food, beaches, shopping and experiences across the whole of Puglia, while accommodation owners use it to bring their properties online. The tagline promises Puglia at 360 degrees, and the product has to deliver that breadth without overwhelming the visitor.
I built this platform end to end as a full stack project.
The challenge
Puglia is not one destination, it is hundreds. The search system covers an enormous list of municipalities, from Bari and Lecce down to villages like Botrugno and Zollino. A traveler rarely knows exactly which town they want; they know roughly where they want to be and what kind of experience they are after. The search had to work the way people actually think.
What I built
The core of the product is the geo search on the homepage: pick a city, set a radius up to 50 kilometers around it, then narrow by category and subcategory. That radius model fits how tourism works in the region, where you sleep in one town and spend your days within driving distance. Behind it sits a geocoded index of every municipality in the region, so a search for stays around Ostuni naturally pulls in the surrounding countryside and coast.
The supply side is just as important as the demand side. The "Inserisci la tua Struttura" flow onboards property owners: they register their structure, describe it, categorize it and get it in front of travelers. This turns the site from a directory someone maintains by hand into a marketplace that grows on its own.
Around the marketplace core I built the editorial layer, a blog for itineraries and local culture that feeds organic search traffic, plus the multilingual infrastructure, contact flows and the information pages a tourism brand needs.
Under the hood
The platform runs on Laravel with MySQL, server-rendered for speed and SEO, with JavaScript handling the interactive search controls. The municipality data, categories and radius queries are all indexed for instant response, because a search that hesitates loses a holiday shopper. SEO was structural from day one: regional tourism lives and dies on Google, so clean URLs, structured metadata and fast pages were requirements, not polish.
The result
Stay In Puglia is live and growing its catalogue of structures across the region, giving small local properties a professional shopfront and travelers a way to plan an entire Puglia trip in one place.