A full website redesign, SEO foundation, and a custom WordPress booking plugin with live distance-based pricing, Stripe payments, toll detection, and member loyalty — built entirely from scratch.

The existing All Hire Cars website was slow, visually outdated, and had no SEO foundation. It ranked for almost nothing in Melbourne search results despite the business having years of experience. We rebuilt it from scratch — clean, dark, and premium to match the standard of the service.

The new site was engineered for performance from the start: optimised image delivery, minimal render-blocking assets, and fast hosting. Full on-page SEO was implemented across every page — proper title tags, meta descriptions, header hierarchy, and internal linking structure. LocalBusiness and TransportAgency structured data was added for Google's rich results.

Dedicated service pages were built for each route type and occasion — airport transfers, corporate bookings, wedding cars, school formals, and winery tours — each targeting its own keyword cluster with unique, location-specific content. This gave the site a clear topical structure for Google to index and rank.

The booking form captures the passenger's pickup and drop-off addresses using Google Places Autocomplete, then calls the Google Maps Distance Matrix API in real time to calculate the actual driving distance. The pricing engine applies a distance-bracket formula to this figure — producing an accurate fare to the kilometre, every time.

Six route types are classified automatically based on the addresses entered: Airport→CBD, CBD→Airport, Airport→Suburb, Suburb→Airport, CBD→Suburb, and Suburb→Suburb. Each route type carries its own pricing formula, ensuring the correct rate structure is applied without any manual intervention.

Toll detection was engineered into the system. CityLink and EastLink routes are identified automatically from the Maps API response, and the applicable toll cost is added to the fare and displayed in the customer-facing price breakdown — no hidden charges, full transparency.

On top of the base distance fare, the plugin applies a layered set of configurable business rules. An off-peak discount is applied automatically for trips booked Monday–Thursday between 9am and 3pm (Melbourne local time, fully DST-aware via PHP's timezone handling). A late-night surcharge of +20% fires automatically for trips between 11pm and 5am.

Vehicle class upgrades are wired into the form and priced automatically: Sedan (base rate), SUV (+$20), Van (+$60), Minibus (+$220). A via-stop pricing module adds to the fare when the passenger requests an intermediate pickup or dropoff point.

A 5% card processing surcharge is added at the Stripe Checkout stage for card payments — shown transparently in the order summary. All rules apply in the correct order and stack accurately. The only rule that cannot stack is the member loyalty discount with the off-peak discount — this conflict is resolved server-side, not in the UI.

Once a customer reviews their booking details and live price breakdown, they proceed directly to Stripe Checkout for secure payment in AUD. On successful payment, three things happen simultaneously: the booking is written to a custom MySQL database table, a confirmation email is dispatched to the passenger with all booking details, and an admin notification email fires to allhirecars@me.com — all without any staff involvement.

Blackout date logic is enforced at the plugin level before Stripe is ever reached. During four designated peak periods — Melbourne Cup (Oct 29–Nov 18), Christmas/New Year (Dec 24–Jan 2), March peak (Mar 3–15), and September peak (Sep 17–27) — the payment flow is disabled and the customer is shown an enquiry message instead. This prevents the business from being locked into underpriced online fares during their highest-demand periods.

The minimum advance booking window is enforced at 8 hours — calculated in Melbourne local time with full DST awareness, so a booking made at 9pm on a Saturday can't be placed for 4am the same night.

Customers can register and log in directly on the booking page. On successful login, their member loyalty discount is retrieved from the database and applied to the live fare calculation automatically — no coupon codes, no manual application.

The discount conflict logic is enforced on the server: if a logged-in member's booking also qualifies for the off-peak discount, only the member discount applies. The system resolves this in PHP before returning the final price to the frontend — it cannot be manipulated client-side.

The member system stores full booking history, saved addresses, and account preferences — reducing friction for repeat customers and giving All Hire Cars a direct data relationship with their most loyal clients.