Booking systems · AI training
2026
The Fish Whisperers
A tide-dependent fishing business went from checking tide charts mid-call to confirming any of 27 booking options from a single screen.
Client
The Fish Whisperers
scope
Booking systems · AI training
year
2026
duration
1 month
Overview
The brief.
The Fish Whisperers, co-founded by my brother Sean McAllister and his business partner, had rave reviews, but their day-to-day operations felt chaotic, and the owners didn’t know why. They needed to find the root cause, and a fix they could trust.
The Challenge
Every booking depended on the tide, and the booking calendar couldn’t show it.
Seven venues with three daily slots (10am, 1pm and 4pm) made 21 combinations, each only viable at the right tide. When someone called about a day and location, the operator had to put them on hold or call back while he checked a tide chart. Standard booking tools prevent double bookings but don’t display tides, and commission-heavy industry apps and weather data subscriptions added cost and fragility. Neither owner knew what the fix should look like, or how to find one they could trust.
the solution
Tested from every angle before building anything.
After auditing the business from the outside and one conversation with Sean’s business partner, I identified tide-checking as the bottleneck. Over about three hours, I ran the problem through Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini and Copilot, using each to challenge the others’ reasoning. The first five solutions looked plausible, but each missed part of the brief. The one that held up was an overlay calendar in Acuity Scheduling, with a full year of high-tide data loaded in as a “dummy staff member”, so tide times appear beside the booking slots with no ongoing weather data subscription. I gave the owners step-by-step instructions to build it themselves; they chose to have me do it. I then coded a lightweight custom web app for bookings on the go, and in a 1.5–2 hour session, set Sean up to use AI independently.
The results
Manual tide-chart checking eliminated
All 21 booking options on one screen at launch; now 27 across nine locations, alongside that day’s tide times and heights
Bookings confirmed during the call, without leaving the calendar
Zero double bookings since launch
No ongoing weather data subscription needed
Five plausible but wrong solutions ruled out before building
Sean went from no AI account to regular, independent use of AI in running the business
The business has since expanded to nine locations and was featured on Channel 7 News.
