Gift vouchers for B&Bs and small hotels
Gift vouchers for B&Bs and small hotels is a SaaS idea for owners of B&Bs, guesthouses, small hotels and glamping sites, priced to test at $19 a month per property. Vouchers are sold over the phone, paid by bank transfer and tracked in a spreadsheet. With it, B&Bs sell gift vouchers on their own site, email a printable gift, and check each code when the guest books.
. A starting point we wrote, not market research: run the 7-day test before you build.
What problem does it solve?
Vouchers are sold over the phone, paid by bank transfer and tracked in a spreadsheet. Owners can’t tell if a code was already used, and nobody knows how many stays are still owed.
Why now: Guests already buy experiences as presents online, and owners would rather keep that money than share it with gift-experience sites.
What do they use today?
Many owners write each voucher on a card or print it from a document template, then keep the codes in a notebook or spreadsheet. A few use a basic voucher page from their website builder.
How does it work?
A buyer picks an amount or a set stay on the voucher page in the guesthouse’s own style, and a printable gift with a unique code is sent by email. When the guest books, the owner checks the code and redeems all or part of its value. Expiry reminders go out before a voucher lapses, and the owner keeps one list of everything still unused.
What goes in the first version?
- A voucher page in the property’s own style
- Vouchers for an amount or a set stay
- A printable gift with a unique code, sent by email
- Check and redeem a code, including part of its value
- Expiry reminders and a list of unused vouchers
Who pays, and how much?
- Who pays
- Owners of B&Bs, guesthouses, small hotels and glamping sites
- Price to test
- $19 a month per property
Each property has its own site, vouchers and guests, so a monthly price per property is simple to follow. Owners already pay monthly for their website and booking tools, so one more subscription is familiar.
How to test it in 7 days
- 1Ask ten B&B owners how they sell and track gift vouchers today.
- 2Look at local B&B websites for voucher offers and note how each one takes payment.
- 3Show three owners a mock voucher page and ask for a pre-order before the gift season.
Where to find the first customers
- B&B and guesthouse owner groups on Facebook
- Local B&B and guesthouse associations
- Web designers who build sites for small hotels
What are the risks?
- Booking engines and website builders offer vouchers, so the angle is simplicity and price.
- Voucher expiry rules differ by country, so expiry settings must be flexible.
How to build it on shipanysaas
4 of the parts it needs are already in the kit. Get the kit, open it in Claude Code, Codex or Cursor, and paste the starting prompt.
- Already in the kit
- Teams and roles
- Billing
- Emails
- In-app notifications
- You build
- Voucher shop page and printable gifts
- Code checks and part redemptions
- Payments on behalf of the business
See the starting prompt
You are in a fresh copy of the shipanysaas starter kit, a pnpm and Turborepo monorepo: the Next.js web app is in apps/web and the Supabase database, with its migrations, in apps/web/supabase. Help me build the first version of Gift vouchers for B&Bs and small hotels. Read AGENTS.md first, then the AGENTS.md in every folder you work in: the kit's rules there win over your defaults. When a skill in .agents/skills (also in .claude/skills and .cursor/skills) matches a task, use it. ## The product - What it does: B&Bs sell gift vouchers on their own site, email a printable gift, and check each code when the guest books. - Who pays: Owners of B&Bs, guesthouses, small hotels and glamping sites - Their problem: Vouchers are sold over the phone, paid by bank transfer and tracked in a spreadsheet. Owners can’t tell if a code was already used, and nobody knows how many stays are still owed. - Price to test: $19 a month per property (a plan in apps/web/config/billing.config.ts) ## Build only this first version 1. A voucher page in the property’s own style 2. Vouchers for an amount or a set stay 3. A printable gift with a unique code, sent by email 4. Check and redeem a code, including part of its value 5. Expiry reminders and a list of unused vouchers ## Already in the kit: reuse it, never rebuild it - Teams and roles: team accounts with members, roles and invitations - Billing: Stripe or Lemon Squeezy subscriptions, per seat or usage-based, and one-off payments - Emails: transactional email through Resend or Nodemailer - In-app notifications: a notifications bell in the web app ## New code it needs - Voucher shop page and printable gifts - Code checks and part redemptions - Payments on behalf of the business ## How to work 1. Plan first: list the database tables (with row-level security, so each team only sees its own rows), the pages and the server actions for the first feature. Then stop and wait for my OK. 2. Build one feature at a time with the kit's own UI and form components, with a migration for every schema change and user-facing text in the translation files. 3. After each feature, run the verification steps in AGENTS.md, fix what they find, and tell me what you built and what comes next. ## Rules - Ask me before you add a dependency, delete a file, or change sign-in, billing or the admin panel. - Leave the parts of the kit this product doesn't use as they are. Done when every first-version feature works for a signed-in team and the AGENTS.md checks pass.
Guides for the parts it uses
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