Hobart.com.au

Hobart.com.au is a tourism platform with a meaningful technical problem behind it: how do you run a network of location-based tourism sites that each feel native to their location, without ending up with twenty separate codebases to maintain? Run twenty individual sites and the maintenance load is impossible; build one site and stretch it to twenty locations through configuration alone, and it ends up feeling generic.

The build threads that needle. A single Python codebase — Wagtail (Django) for the content side, a custom Flask service for the API layer — runs all 20 domains. Each domain has its own editorial overlay, its own location-specific content, and its own brand presentation, but they share the underlying logic for content management, search, and the third-party integrations that pull live data into the platform.

The Flask API is the technical heart. It connects to tourism and accommodation booking platforms (Wotif, Rezdy, and others), pulls live availability and listing data, normalises it across providers, and serves it to the front-end domains in a consistent shape. Each visitor sees a site that's relevant to where they are — local tours, local accommodation, locally curated content — without anyone in the editorial team duplicating work across twenty separate sites.

The work covered everything end-to-end: the Flask API, the Wagtail front end, the multi-domain configuration, the API integrations, and the performance and security work needed to run a platform of this scale reliably. It's not a simple website; it's an application that happens to look like one.