AI Booking Agent

Problem

A dinner for six, a hotel with a price ceiling, a haircut next Friday: each one starts as a sentence and then gets retyped into a form. If the guest changes the time or the party size, the search usually starts over, and the charge can land before the cancellation terms are obvious.

Solution

Meridian keeps the request in the thread. It shows the fields it understood, updates them when the guest corrects it, and holds the table while a countdown runs. The deposit is a separate step, with the policy and the card on file in view, and the pay button waits for a checked consent line.

• Built the guest app and admin console in Next.js 16, TypeScript, and Tailwind. TanStack Query holds server state. Zustand only covers local UI.
• The API is NestJS 11 on Fastify: REST with OpenAPI, Zod on every boundary, and RBAC around bookings, payments, and handoffs.
• PostgreSQL 18 stores the booking model. PostGIS handles radius search, pgvector stays in the same database, and Redis caches availability and rate limits.
• Temporal runs the hold, the payment, and the human approval, with retries and compensation when a provider or a charge fails.
• The assistant uses the OpenAI Agents SDK with structured outputs, so a tool call cannot fire on a malformed intent. Stripe takes the deposit only after the guest confirms.
• Twilio covers SMS and WhatsApp. Confirmed bookings sync to Google Calendar and Outlook, receipts go to S3, and OpenTelemetry plus Sentry trace the path from the model call through payment.