Hetarth Consulting & Online Travel Agency: Building a Tour & Activity Extranet System
Background
Our client, an online travel agency based in Colombo, Sri Lanka, sells tours and travel packages and gives travellers the option to pay for them on an installment plan over a 2- to 12-month period. They offer a wide range of travel booking services, including multi-day tours & cruises, internal and external flights, hotels, activities, and packages.
The client reached out to Hetarth Consulting to build a tour and activity extranet system where they can invite other tour and activity operators as well and help them to sell their products via their own B2C and B2B sales channels.
Challenges
Within the scope, our team faced the following challenges:
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Explore the key bottlenecks of extranet systems.
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TAMS (Tour & Activity Management System) extranet Design.
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Real time availability & pricing management.
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Develop the back-office system with authentication and authorization.
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Creating an adjustable markup & commission engine.
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Accounting & invoicing for suppliers, agents & customers.
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B2B & B2C distribution channels.
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Designing web and mobile UX/UI.
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Achieving a high level of system performance.
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SEO Friendly booking engine.
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Auto suggests world wide regions for easy search.
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Travel cart feature for booking multiple services together and paying at once.
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Social login with Facebook & Google.
Value Delivered
Supplier Portal for Tours & Activity Management
Enable signup for tour & activity suppliers worldwide who can add their offerings online with basic information, tour options & real time availability & pricing. Suppliers can manage their bookings as well from the same portal along with accounting and invoicing.
B2B & B2C Sales Distribution Channels
Enable portal to sell products inventories towards customers & sales agents on markup or discount basis via B2C & B2B distribution channels. B2C enables guests to become customers and book tours & activities 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 & sales agents 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. Suppliers and sales agents also get necessary statistics through reports.
Designing Product’s UX/UI
The team of designers created a minimalistic design for the b2c & b2b 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 extranet. 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 6 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), PHP + Laravel (for backend and APIs), MySQL, Git & Amazon Web Services.
Services provided within the project framework: Central Reservation System
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Here Is a Snapshot of Technologies We Use
Back End Engineering
Front End Engineering
MVC Frameworks
Databases
Cross-Platform & Native Mobile
Data & Analytics
