Case Study

A dog park that books itself.

Booking, payment, and gate access for Holyhead Town Council. Fully automated, end to end.

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"Working like clockwork. Unbelievable job."

Nick Murphy, Tourism and Grants Officer, Holyhead Town Council
RT
Rachel Tenacious
Facebook comment, 3 weeks after launch

Yes, so happy you have done this and have just booked in, thank you ๐Ÿ˜Š๐Ÿงก๐Ÿ’š๐Ÿพ

72

Successful bookings in week one

0

Staff time per booking

2

Paid subscriptions retired

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 didn't wait. They just went somewhere else.

Intensely manual for the council. Incredibly frustrating for the customer. And it was never going to take Y Bark anywhere.

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 via Stripe. Within seconds they get a unique 4-digit PIN by email. That PIN is live on the gate lock for their booked window. They walk up, type it in, walk in.

The Y Bark booking page on iPhone: slot picker showing May 2026 calendar
The whole customer experience on one page. Pick a slot. Pay. Get a PIN. Walk in. No phone calls. No waiting for the kiosk to open.

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 can see and manage them in Outlook like any other appointment. The Igloo smart lock provisions its own PINs via the iglooaccess bridge. Stripe handles payment, with an automatic refund if anything fails before the PIN actually 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's it.

The whole system runs on the council's own subdomain at ybark.holyheadcouncil.co.uk, sitting alongside their main website. No third-party platforms holding their customers' data. Their brand, their hosting, their audit trail.

For the council, an admin dashboard shows every booking, every payment, every PIN, every refund. Filters for failed bookings and anomalies, plus trend charts for the last 7 days and all-time.

Y Bark admin dashboard showing booking volume, revenue, recent bookings and PIN audit trail
What the council sees. Every booking, every PIN, every refund, on demand.

72 bookings. Zero staff time.

72 successful bookings in week one.
No public promotion. Word of mouth and organic traffic carried it.
Zero staff time per booking.
Two paid subscriptions retired (SimplyBook.me, plus the manual Igloo workflow).
Audit trail for everything.
Every PIN, every payment, every refund, visible on demand.

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's the bit most automation projects miss. The happy path is easy. 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.

Smart padlock on a gate

The booking page is the easy part. Making a physical lock unlock 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. No staff in the loop.

The stack.

PHP Stripe Checkout Microsoft Graph (Calendar + Mail.Send) iglooaccess bridge API Apache

No frameworks. No build step. No third-party booking platform.

Pricing model: Tiered, computed server-side. ยฃ5 per hour for 1 to 3 dogs. ยฃ7.50 per hour for 4 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, we should talk. Bookings, payments, access, confirmations, refunds, audit trails. All running themselves.

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