On a sun-soaked June 1st, it was finally time: food and beverage establishments were allowed to open their doors again. But, in these times, how can you enjoy your favorite terrace in a safe, controlled and responsible way? Terrasjeboeken.nl came up with the solution: a platform where everyone can book a table, inside or outside, at a time of their choice. With this you are assured of a nice and safe place.
The start
Marcel Roorda, Managing Director at the Enschede-based IT company Doop: “The entrepreneur Jurgen Wissink and his daughter Laury from Oldenzaal came up with the idea at the kitchen table. To investigate whether the idea would also catch on in the hospitality industry, they contacted hospitality entrepreneur Danny Kuijpers and presented the idea to him. He was immediately enthusiastic, after which they came to me together with the question of whether I could build the platform.”
Samenwerking met Fundaments
“While working out the marketing plan, we got into talks with Heineken. At Heineken, they were so enthusiastic about our platform that they included it in the 1.5m brochure to all their hospitality customers (over 20,000). To get off to a good start right away, we scaled up our infrastructure to facilitate the expected traffic. To handle all traffic quickly and efficiently (making bookings and payments) we needed a High Availability (HA) database. We do have the knowledge for this, but given the limited time, we did not have the capacity. That's why we chose Firewall as a Service (inclusief DDoS laundry lane) and Database Clustering by Fundaments. Besides, we have already hosted more with Doop at Fundaments and they offer us the necessary expertise in firewalling, load balancing and setting up and managing a HA MariaDB cluster. The big challenge was that the firewall and loadbalancer had to be operational within 3 days and the database within 7 days. Fundaments more than succeeded in this, so we now have an incredibly beautiful platform in place.”
How does Terrasjeboeken.nl work?
“The platform brings the hospitality industry and consumers together.
Hospitality establishments can join us for free and consumers then choose a terrace of their choice.
After passing on the number of people, the composition of the group (one household or friends) as well as the time slot, the consumer transfers €1. After this, the consumer receives a QR code that serves as an entry ticket and is scanned at the terrace. For each QR code scanned, we donate €0.50 to the respective hospitality establishment. By now I can proudly say that more than 200 catering establishments are already connected.”
