Rebuilds An Online Travel Agency With GDS API Integration

TRAVEL

Hetarth Consulting Rebuilds an Online Travel Agency with GDS API Integration

Background

Our client, an online travel agency based in Dubai, UAE, would like to offer a wide range of online booking services as a one stop booking destination for their clients. They offer lay-by travel booking services with a wide range of services, including multi-day tours & cruises, internal and external flights, hotels, activities, and packages.

The company had an outdated platform and they reached out to Hetarth Consulting to build an online travel portal with third party API integration from various GDS & OTAs. As a result of the cooperation, our team has developed a completely new platform that embraces both the customer-facing application and back-office. Currently, the platform offers flight and hotel booking, with a car rental feature on the way.

Challenges

Within the scope, our team faced the following challenges:

Explore the key bottlenecks of travel supplier integration.
Integrating Travelport GDS (Global Distribution System) API into a platform.
Designing web and mobile UX/UI.
Creating an adjustable markup & commission engine.
Improving booking and ticketing flow.
Achieving a high level of system performance.
SEO Friendly booking engine.
Develop the back-office system.
Auto suggests world wide regions for easy search.
Social login with Facebook & Google.
Progressive web apps for iOS & Android.

Value Delivered

Integrating GDSs and Third-party Services

As the platform’s main focus is flight and hotel booking, our team connected it to Travelport GDS (Travelport Universal API) for flight & hotel booking. Hetarth Consulting team has enabled the platform with a PayFort payment gateway to accept payments from worldwide with multiple currency support.

B2B & B2C Sales Distribution Channels

Enable portal to sell inventories towards customers & sales agents on markup or discount basis via B2C & B2B distribution channels. B2C enables guests to become customers and book flights and hotels on discounted rates. While B2B enables agents to sell inventory towards their customers on white label basis with their own markups.

Building Custom Markup & Commission Rules

To run a pricing strategy, any OTA needs a commission engine. We’ve built a flexible commission engine that allows for configuring how markup and discounts are applied to different travel products depending on various factors, e.g. city pair, traffic source, type of travel, carrier, etc. This helps company’s revenue managers be as adjustable as possible and keep the OTA pricing both competitive and meeting revenue goals.

MIS Reports & Dashboards

The Back-Office system offers a wide variety of reports which you can also export as PDF & Excel. Dashboards provide you with up-to-date important business analytics.

Designing Product’s UX/UI

The team of designers created a minimalistic design for the platform. The website has rich navigation to simplify travel product search and booking. Our team also designed an admin panel for back-office and the customer-facing design of the OTA.

Creating Robust Architecture

Every day the platform deals with numerous search and booking requests from web & mobile and has to process data coming from GDSs. This can result in overloading and service unavailability. To ensure zero downtime, our team has chosen an API ready approach to the architecture, making all API services stateless.

Product UI

Approach and Technical Info

The project was completed over the course of 4 months by a team of nine professionals: 1 business analyst, 2 back-end engineers, 2 front-end engineers, 1 QA engineers, 2 UX/UI designers, and a project manager.

The team used the Agile/Scrum framework in the workflow. The technology stack included HTML5 + CSS3, Bootstrap, Javascript, Typescript, AngularJS(for frontend), Laravel(for backend and APIs), MySQL, Git & Amazon Web Services.

Services provided within the project framework: Travel API Integration