Overview

StayForge is a full-featured hotel booking and management platform built on Laravel 12. It ships with a guest-facing booking site and a completely separate admin panel, dual AI providers (OpenAI and Anthropic Claude) that can be toggled feature-by-feature, and four payment gateways that admins can enable independently.

Architecture

The codebase follows standard Laravel conventions with a few dedicated service layers so that AI providers and payment gateways can be swapped or extended without touching controllers:

• App\Services\AI\AIManager — single entry point for every AI call. Reads the global switch, the per-feature switch, and the chosen provider before delegating to OpenAIService or AnthropicService.
• App\Services\Payment\PaymentManager — resolves which payment gateways are enabled and exposes a common PaymentGatewayInterface to the checkout flow.
• App\Services\UploadService — the single place every file upload passes through, writing to the uploads disk (public/uploads).
• App\Models\Setting — a generic key/value store (grouped by ai, payment, mail, site) that backs every admin-editable setting, with optional encryption for secrets.

Data Model

Search & Booking

Guests search by city, dates, price range and star rating. Availability is computed by checking each room's total inventory against overlapping bookings in pending, confirmed, or checked_in status — no separate availability cron job required.

Booking a room calculates nights, subtotal, tax, and any coupon discount server-side before creating the booking record, then hands off to the selected payment gateway.

Payments

The checkout page only ever shows gateways the admin has switched on. Each gateway implements the same three-method interface:

Account Features

• My Bookings — view, cancel, and revisit the AI trip summary for any past or upcoming stay.
• Wishlist — one-click save/unsave on any hotel page.
• Reviews — post-stay ratings and comments, auto-analyzed for sentiment.

Hotels & Rooms

Admins (or scoped hotel managers) create hotels and rooms, assign amenities, upload galleries, and optionally generate descriptions or price suggestions with one click using AI. Every image uploaded here lands in public/uploads/hotels/ or public/uploads/rooms/.

Bookings & Reviews

The bookings table supports filtering by status and hotel, with an inline status-change dropdown for the full pipeline: pending → confirmed → checked_in → checked_out (plus cancelled / no_show). The reviews screen shows the AI sentiment tag next to each review and lets admins approve, reject, or reply.

Reports

Revenue-by-hotel and occupancy (bookings / room-nights) reports are available for any date range, computed directly from completed payments and confirmed bookings.

How AI Is Wired

Every AI-powered feature calls AIManager::chat($feature, $messages). Internally this:

• Checks the global ai.enabled setting — if off, returns null immediately.
• Checks the feature-level setting (e.g. ai.feature_chatbot_enabled) — if off, returns null.
• Resolves the provider: a per-feature override if set, otherwise the global default (OpenAI or Anthropic).
• Calls the provider's HTTP API directly (no SDK lock-in) and returns plain text, or null on failure — callers always handle a null response gracefully (e.g. recommendations fall back to popularity ranking).

Feature Reference

AI Settings

Located at Admin → Settings → AI. Configure the global switch, default provider, both providers' API keys and models, and per-feature enable + provider-override toggles. Keys are stored encrypted in the settings table.

Payment Settings

Located at Admin → Settings → Payments. Enable/disable Manual, Stripe, PayPal and Razorpay independently, each with its own credential fields. Multiple gateways can be active simultaneously.

Email Settings

Located at Admin → Settings → Email. Set mailer type (SMTP/Sendmail/Log), host, port, credentials and encryption, plus a from-address and from-name. A DynamicSettingsServiceProvider applies these over config/mail.php at runtime — no .env edit or redeploy needed. A "Send Test Email" button confirms the configuration instantly.

Uploads

All uploads — hotel/room images, avatars — pass through App\Services\UploadService, which writes to the uploads filesystem disk (mapped to public/uploads). No storage:link symlink is required, which makes this compatible with shared hosting environments that don't allow symlinks.

Route Reference

Extending the Platform

Add a new payment gateway by implementing PaymentGatewayInterface and registering it in PaymentManager::__construct() — it appears in checkout and the settings screen automatically. Add a new AI provider the same way via AIProviderInterface. New languages/currencies are just rows in the languages / currencies tables.