My own product · live
HelpTravel.pl, a travel booking product I built
A Polish service for searching, booking and paying for flights and hotels in one place. Prices are in złoty, payment happens on the site and no account is needed. I built it from scratch and I’m still developing it.
- Sector
- Travel product: search, bookings and payments
- My role
- Product direction, UX and design, content and code, from the first version to today
- What it shows
- A working product with search, booking and payment, still in development
- As of
- September 2026
The product’s job
Take a person from search to payment so that at every step they know what they’re choosing and what they’ll pay. No account, prices in złoty and no redirects to someone else’s site halfway through.
Every decision followed from that: the order of screens, how prices are shown, what is visible before payment and what the service deliberately leaves out.
What’s in the product
Checked live in September 2026. The interface is in Polish.
- hotel and flight search, plus a “Don’t know where” tab for the undecided
- hotel results with filters, a map, the total price and the price per night in złoty
- a hotel page with rate options and the cost of flexibility stated plainly
- booking and payment on the site through Stripe, without an account
- flights with fares, baggage and booking in four steps
- a travel assistant that builds a package from current offers
- 22 destinations and 12 guide articles
- handling for the case where a payment goes through but the booking doesn’t
From search to payment
Each of the five screens is responsible for one decision on the booking path.
01
Search opens the product
The first screen starts with a flight or hotel search. The product starts by asking where someone wants to go. Promotions don’t get in the way of the first step.
02
The price is broken down where it matters
Results show the total and the price per night in złoty. Taxes paid at the property are listed separately, already in the results.
03
Context before choosing a room
The hotel page brings together photos, location, policies and room options before anyone gets to a specific rate.
04
Flexibility doesn’t hide in the small print
Rate options show the cost of flexibility plainly, for example “+8 zł for the option to cancel”.
05
Before paying, you know who takes the payment
Booking needs no account. Before payment, the service names the seller responsible for the transaction.
Flights have their own full path
A Warsaw to Barcelona search checked on 25 September 2026 returned 494 offers. Results can be narrowed by stops, price and airline, and the Cheapest, Fastest and Direct tags help people choose without comparing everything by hand.
When choosing a fare, the included baggage is visible straight away. Booking takes four steps: flight, baggage and fare, passenger details, payment.
A real assistant screen. Suggestions and prices change with the current search.
One sentence becomes a priced package
The assistant puts together a hotel and a flight from offers available in the search. It doesn’t make up prices, and the chat shows who provides the AI and how data is processed.
An example checked on 25 September 2026: asked in Polish for a city break up to 1,500 zł per person for 2 people, the assistant proposed Budapest, 4 nights at Dean’s Home Budapest (rated 9.2) and a direct Wizz Air flight for 2,292 zł in total, or 1,146 zł per person.
Trust is part of the product
With booking and payment, trust can’t be added at the end. LiteAPI supplies the offers, Stripe handles payment, and NUITEE TRAVEL is named before payment as the seller responsible for the transaction.
There are no invented prices, no fake urgency and no reviews the service didn’t collect. The lack of BLIK support is stated up front, before anyone reaches payment.
Engineering decisions
Under the interface, rules look after prices, payments and failures. I built the service with Next.js, React and TypeScript.
One source of offers
Hotels and flights come from one supplier, so price and availability have a single source.
Payment without a booking
If a payment goes through but the booking fails, a separate flow records the case and gives it a number for support.
Prices refreshed in the background
Prices on the homepage refresh regularly in the background.
No data, no number
If the source returns no price, the product doesn’t guess one.
How it changed
From sending people to partners to its own booking and payment on the site.
Launch as a site that redirected to affiliate partners.
LiteAPI integration: real hotel prices in złoty on the site.
“From X zł” prices that didn’t come from current data are removed.
Affiliate partners and the partner links page are removed.
Distribution shaped the product
People find HelpTravel through TikTok, and in-app browsers can break the hand-off to a banking app during card payment. So at the payment step the service detects the TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Messenger browsers and offers to open the page in a regular browser, with one-tap link copying.
After launch
Two numbers from the product owner, each about something different.
- 13,000active users in approximately the first six months
- 5Morganic TikTok views
What this means for your project
HelpTravel shows that I can build and grow a product with search, booking, payment and integrations. Your business most likely doesn’t need a system like that. Every project gets the same approach, though: a path that leads to a decision, terms shown plainly and a site built to work for real people.