AltexSoft Built a Self-Service Booking Platform for Closed User Groups
- Business domain
- Travel
- Services
- Travel Technology Practice
- Technology
- ReactReduxUI/UXMS SQL ServerTerraformAmazon Web Services
Background
Our client, a US travel club, offers branded leisure programs to tens of thousands of private members. Initially, they focused on renting out timeshare condos and villas but gradually started selling other products — such as cruises, hotels, and car rentals. As they integrated with more vendors, it became difficult to navigate their website. This led to the growth of concierge services, which, in turn, suffered from employee turnover and caused significant financial losses.
Another problem the company faced was the lack of direct connections with travel suppliers. Most of their content came from intermediaries, so our client could count on only a tiny fraction of commissions.
The travel club reached out to AltexSoft to build a modern platform with an intuitive interface and access to a wide range of products from direct suppliers and resellers.
Challenges
The self-service booking platform designed by AltexSoft addresses the following business challenges.
Create a seamless booking experience for closed user groups
Establish direct integrations with suppliers to increase revenue
Expand the range of available travel products
Minimize the manual work and human error when managing prices
Value Delivered
Providing a consistent look and feel across the website
The client’s website was a combination of white-label solutions from numerous travel providers, which didn’t feel consistent. Our experts redesigned UI/UX to bring uniformity across different visual elements, enhancing user interactions with the system. As a result, non-tech-savvy clients can easily buy whatever they want, with little to no help from live support.
Integrating with timeshare resorts, payment gateways, and a review platform
AltexSoft established direct connections with two timeshare companies — the first leveraging content from over 4,200 resorts and the second maintaining a network of nearly 3,000 resorts globally. We also built integrations with payment gateways to accept credit cards and a guest feedback platform to collect and analyze customer reviews and hotel ratings.
Getting Priceline content via Travolutionary, an all-in-one hotel aggregation platform
Travolutionary links travel resellers to inventory from 80 suppliers via a single API, eliminating the need to build multiple integrations. However, you must get a separate certification from each vendor you want to partner with. So, after connecting the client’s platform to Travolutionary, our team navigated a complex approval process with the supplier of choice — Priceline. We successfully verified that the website correctly presents data from Priceline.
Automating price calculation
We also built a commission engine for hotels and condos that automates adding markups (a flat fee or a percentage of a sale price) to a base rate. It applies predefined rules to calculate a final price depending on property location, supplier, and user group. The module lets our client be flexible with commissions while reducing manual work and human error.
Approach and Technical Info
The partnership lasted about two years, involving two front-end developers, three back-end developers, two QA engineers, a solution architect, a project manager, a business analyst, and a UI/UX designer.
The technology stack includes React, Redux, Ant Design, ASP.NET Core, Entity Framework (EF) Core, Microsoft SQL Server, Terraform, Amazon Elastic Container Register (ECR) and Elastic Container Service (ECS), AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and AWS Lambda.
ReactReduxUI/UXMS SQL ServerTerraformAmazon Web Services