DOT Travels
Seat booking for university students, replacing a WhatsApp sign up sheet.
- Role
- Designer and developer
- Type
- Solo
- Year
- 2026
- Status
- Live
- Category
- Products
- Main stack
- Next.js, React +8
Overview
DOT Travels is the student transport booking platform for the Federal University of Technology Owerri, run with the Student Union Government Directorate of Transport. It replaces a manual WhatsApp sign up sheet with a real booking system.
Students browse upcoming trips, choose a seat and pay through Squad. Seats are held for fifteen minutes during checkout, and after payment the seat is theirs with a downloadable PDF ticket. Every trip has a live chat, and drivers see the full passenger list and can look passengers up by code at boarding.
Admins get separate dashboards for publishing trips, tracking revenue, reading feedback and managing a financial ledger, with an audit log behind every change.
Highlights
- •Seat holding enforced in three layers, so double bookings cannot happen.
- •Live trip chat with a polling fallback.
- •Role based admin tiers: publisher, director of transport and platform admin.
- •Installable PWA with server generated PDF tickets.
- •Built entirely on free tier services so it costs nothing to run at campus scale.
A hard part
The problem
Two students tapping the same seat at the same moment must never both succeed, and abandoned checkouts must not block seats forever.
How it was solved
Seat locking relies on real database transactions and partial unique indexes in Postgres, with an hourly cron that releases expired holds.
Built with
- Next.js
- React
- TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS
- Prisma
- PostgreSQL
- Vercel
- Squad
- Pusher
- Resend
