How Slovakia's biggest fun park moved bookings, parties and ordering off the phone.

Steam Factory has operated the largest attraction park in Slovakia for over six years. Multiple attractions, a full-service restaurant, kids parties, summer camps, season pass holders, and tens of thousands of visitors a year — all run from the front desk.

The product worked. The operation behind it didn't scale.

There was no online booking — every reservation went through a phone call or a walk-up. No online payments, paper waivers on every visit, kids parties booked by phone only, no email capture, restaurant queues at peak hours, and a POS with a limited API never designed to talk to a modern booking platform.

The off-the-shelf shortlist didn't fit either. As part of discovery we tested six industry-leading headless booking systems. None handled the park's reality: each attraction has its own duration, capacity and session rules. Generic 30- or 60-minute slot logic broke immediately.

The brand needed a refresh too — the visual identity hadn't kept pace with the operation.

Before the platform, the brand. We shipped a new visual identity for Steam Factory — logo, system, and the look that now carries across web, app, signage and merch.

Discovery did the boring work that stops you shipping the wrong thing. We mapped every customer journey (walk-ins, parties, summer camps, season pass holders, restaurant guests), audited the operations behind the desk (phone, paper, POS, accounting), and tested six industry-leading headless booking systems against the park's real rules.

None passed. Building custom was the conclusion the evidence forced, not a preference we started with.

When the off-the-shelf tools failed, we built our own. Slots are generated on the fly when a customer picks a date — no pre-filled calendar to maintain. Per-attraction rules cover any duration, any capacity, any session constraint, all configurable from the backoffice without touching code.

Customers add complementary attractions and products before checkout, pay online, then show a QR code on arrival. Staff scan it and already know what's booked.

Kids parties used to mean a phone call. Now parents customize the package, book a deposit and pay online, while employees see every party booking in the same backoffice as standard reservations and can still create or edit on behalf of customers who prefer to call.

Digital onboarding waivers replaced paper forms — first visit fills it out once on a tablet, every visit after pre-fills by phone number. Restaurant guests scan a QR at the table and order from their phone, so waiters focus on serving instead of taking orders. Season passes and merch sit in the same eshop and checkout, sharing one cart, one payment system and one customer record.

The hardest part of the project was the POS and accounting integration. The existing POS wasn't built to be integrated with a modern booking platform, so we built a custom sync layer around its API limits — online orders, bookings and payments now flow back into the systems the business already runs on, without forcing a migration.

Payload CMS gives the marketing team direct control over content, events and news. The customer-facing mobile app shares the same booking flow, QR check-in and eshop as the web. And every Monday, decision-makers get an automated report on online sales performance in their inbox.

Bookings, parties and merch come in overnight, outside opening hours. Front-desk and phone load is down — returning customers self-serve, parties book themselves. Email capture happens at every booking instead of nowhere. Staff and stakeholders see the same data, in real time.

A lot of agencies would have forced the client into one of the booking platforms they already knew. We tested six of them first, then built what the business actually needed. The result is a platform that fits how this park runs — not how a SaaS vendor thinks parks should run.