Work › Y Bark
A dog park that books itself.
Booking, payment and gate access for Holyhead Town Council. End to end, with nobody in the loop.
The first week after launch
- Successful bookings
- 72
- Staff time per booking
- 0
- Paid subscriptions retired
- 2
"Working like clockwork. Unbelievable job."
What they had: manual bookings, office hours only.
Every booking meant a staff member at the council's local pancake cafe generating a PIN in the iglooaccess app and typing it into an email. Hopefully without a typo. Every single time.
The cafe had shorter hours than the park. If you wanted an early morning slot and were thinking about it on Friday night, you waited until Monday. A lot of people did not wait. They went somewhere else.
Intensely manual for the council. Frustrating for the customer. And it was never going to take Y Bark anywhere.
What was built: end to end, no human in the loop.
Customers see live availability up to eight weeks ahead, pick a slot, choose how many dogs, and pay by card. Within seconds they get a unique four-digit PIN by email. That PIN is live on the gate lock for their booked window. They walk up, type it in, walk in.
Behind that page, six systems are quietly doing their jobs. Bookings drop into the council's shared Microsoft 365 calendar through the Graph API, so staff manage them in Outlook like any other appointment. The Igloo smart lock provisions its own PINs. Stripe handles payment, with an automatic refund if anything fails before the PIN reaches the lock. Emails go out through Microsoft Graph, so they arrive from the council's own domain.
No bespoke admin interface for staff to learn. Block out maintenance time? Add an event in Outlook. That is it.
The whole system runs on the council's own subdomain, alongside their main website. No third-party platform holding their customers' data. Their brand, their hosting, their audit trail.
What the council sees.
An admin dashboard shows every booking, every payment, every PIN, every refund. Filters for failed bookings and anomalies, plus trend charts for the last seven days and all time.
Seventy-two successful bookings in week one, with no public promotion. Word of mouth and organic traffic carried it. Zero staff time per booking, two paid subscriptions retired, and an audit trail for everything.
The moment that mattered.
Three weeks in, the gate's internet bridge dropped offline overnight. One booking came in during the gap. The system detected the failure, refunded the customer automatically, logged it, and resumed normal operation the next morning.
The council found out through the audit log. Not through a complaint. Not through a frustrated customer standing at a locked gate at six in the morning with a dog that needed a run.
That is the bit most automation projects miss. The happy path is easy, and anyone can build a system that works when everything works. The work is in the moment something breaks, at 3am on a Sunday, and the system catches itself, makes the customer whole, and tells you what happened without you having to be there.
The booking page is the easy part.
Making a physical lock open for the right person at the right time, every time, is the work. Most booking platforms hand off at payment. Y Bark goes further: the same workflow that confirms the booking provisions a PIN on a smart padlock, live only for the booked hour.
The stack
- PHP
- Stripe Checkout
- Microsoft Graph, calendar and mail
- iglooaccess bridge API
- Apache
No frameworks, no build step, no third-party booking platform. Pricing is tiered and computed server-side: £5 per hour for one to three dogs, £7.50 per hour for four or more.
Could your facility work like this?
If something in your business still relies on someone being at a desk during opening hours doing the same job over and over, it is worth a conversation. Bookings, payments, access, confirmations, refunds, audit trails, all running themselves.
Or email hello@quietwork.co.uk directly.