Building a private-jet charter booking platform in PHP and WordPress

Charter buyers don't just book A to B. The search supports one-way, round-trip and multi-city trips, with airport suggestions drawn from more than 71,000 open airports and heliports, passenger controls and aircraft types. Each request is checked against route range and cabin capacity before a server-calculated estimate is shown.

Quote requests get a reference number, and contact, enterprise, operator, membership and support forms all land in one admin desk. There, the team updates request status, manages aircraft availability and pricing, and answers support messages.

Customers can register, sign in, edit their profile and see their own request history. Password resets use expiring, single-use links. Private attachments are only downloadable by the people allowed to see them.

• An aircraft catalogue with category filters and load-more browsing
• Searchable airport, city, state and country directories
• An article library with category filters
• A catering menu with categories, a cart and server-side pricing

The first version is plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript on PHP 8.3 with SQLite, which made it fast to build and test locally. For launch, I moved it onto WordPress with a custom theme and a core plugin, plus migration tooling, so the client's team can edit pages and manage content without a developer.