Charter Quoting Platform

Charter customers compare brokers, so the speed and polish of the first priced document often decides the deal. Assembling that document manually is slow and error-prone: agents copy aircraft imagery and specifications into layout tools, compute arrival times across origin and destination timezones by hand, track proposal numbers themselves, and inevitably drift from the brand's presentation standards.

The business needed one system that owned all the inputs, fleet data, airports, pricing, brand templates, and produced the output that actually matters: a consistent, branded, customer-ready PDF, generated fast enough to win the enquiry.

The proposal document is what the customer actually sees, so the rendering pipeline got the most engineering attention. We built it on Handlebars page templates rendered through headless Chromium at exact A4 geometry, with brand fonts embedded and every aircraft image downloaded, recompressed, and inlined as data URIs, so the document renders identically wherever it is opened and never ships with broken images.

We designed for two speeds of selling: agents get both a full proposal (cover, introduction letter, itinerary, per-aircraft pages, closing page) and a quick quotation without the cover, matching the rhythm of fast first response followed by polished follow-up.

We also made data entry cheap. A fleet of aircraft with three photos each is tedious to key in, so the catalog supports bulk import from a single ZIP containing a spreadsheet and an images folder, with images matched to rows by filename, uploaded to cloud storage automatically, and per-row validation errors reported back to the agent.

An agent enters the customer's name, builds the itinerary leg by leg, searching a seeded database of over 26,000 airports through paginated, debounced dropdowns, and sets date, departure time, duration, and passenger count per leg. The system computes arrival times across origin and destination timezones automatically. The agent picks aircraft from the fleet with search-as-you-type, overriding price, year, currency, and remarks per aircraft, and attaching cabin features on the fly.

One click assembles the document server-side: cover, introduction letter, journey page, one presentation page per aircraft with exterior, interior, and floorplan imagery, and a closing page with contact details and legal disclaimer. Every proposal carries a sequential number. Because generation involves image downloads and browser rendering, the API streams live progress over Server-Sent Events, so the agent watches a real progress bar rather than a spinner.

Around the core workflow sits full management tooling: fleet CRUD with Excel export and ZIP bulk import, an airport directory, a reusable aircraft-features system, admin-managed user accounts with SMTP welcome emails, and a template screen where marketing edits the cover letter, cover image, and footer without a code release. A nightly job purges generated PDFs older than 30 days from storage and history, keeping document storage bounded by design.