Hetarth Consulting Creates a Concept of Travel Planning App With Real Time Booking Capability
Background
Our client, a new travel tech startup based in New Jersey, USA, would like to offer a budget based trip planning & itinerary generation for travellers with real time booking capabilities for flights, hotels & activities.
The client reached out to Hetarth Consulting to design and develop their trip planner app for web & mobile with extensive use of third party APIs from GDS for flights, hotels and activities & Google for maps, routes and places.
Challenges
Within the scope, our team faced the following challenges:
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Explore the key bottlenecks of a trip planning app.
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Integrating Amadeus GDS API to get inventories for Flights, Hotels & Activities.
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Integrating Google API for maps, routes & places.
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Plan itinerary within budget constraints.
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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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Offer real time booking for the services.
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SEO Friendly itinerary planning.
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Auto suggests world wide regions for easy search.
Value Delivered
Trip planning Algorithm Design
Planning and suggesting optimum trip planning based on user inputs in terms of destinations, duration, budget etc. is always tricky and requires a lot of logical thinking altogether. Here getting the inventories from various third parties via APIs (GDS or OTAs) required lots of data mining. Giving a flexibility towards users to update and share itineraries with their groups or co-travellers make the system more iterative.
Offer Real Time Booking of Services
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.
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. As an administrator, you get statistics about type of itineraries, hot destinations & public interests effortlessly.
Designing Product’s UX/UI
The team of designers created a minimalistic design for the b2c platform. The website has rich navigation to simplify trip planning and booking. Our team also designed an admin panel for the back-office.
Creating Robust Architecture
Every day the platform deals with numerous search, plan & booking requests from web & mobile and has to process data coming from the third party GDS/OTAs. 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), PHP + Laravel (for backend and APIs), MySQL, Git & Amazon Web Services.
Services provided within the project framework: Travel Technology Solutions
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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
