Booking service price aggregator
Services:
Project overview
Our client is a well-known organization supplying resellers with advanced direct connect distribution platforms. The company is a market leader providing modern, standard compliant, B2B and Host2Host solutions, streamlining hotel & resort, flight, car, and other popular types of bookings.
Abto Software has entered the collaboration to develop an unprecedented direct connect distribution API. Our team successfully delivered a solution allowing resellers and distributors to connect with hospitality, airlines, transportation, travel and entertainment vendors to provide their services more efficiently.
Main goals
Our engineers were contracted to develop a solution that uses hotel booking API support to receive and store up-to-date information and provide relevant details, including available rooms, dates, prices, and more.
The project can be divided into two phases:
- At the first stage, we built an aggregator that processes up-to-date information being later used for service provision
- At the second stage, we integrated instant notifications to inform interested parties about changes associated with placed or canceled bookings, and else
How the solution works
Our solution is designed to gather up-to-date information for resellers that provide travel and lifestyle services. By using SOAP requests, our system regularly collects required details from previously specified sources.
Our solution gathers data 1-3 times a day, allowing resellers to update relevant information in a timely manner. When detecting placed reservations and cancellations, the system sends repeated SOAP requests, since these can affect final pricing.
The process in brief:
- We send a request to a specific company to receive a list of vendors to monitor
- By sending SOAP requests, our API automatically collects up-to-date information indicating available hotel rooms, dates, prices, and more
- The company receives a comprehensive summary that contains relevant details for the year ahead
- The company then applies up-to-date information to provide seamless booking
Other features to mention:
- If the booked flight is postponed or canceled, the system automatically rearranges the trip, from flight to hotel and other indicated services (car rental, golf court, spa services)
- If one of the multiple rooms being booked is reserved by someone else prior to completion, the system automatically interrupts the reservation to eliminate additional inconveniences with cancellation
Our contribution
Abto Software has worked on implementing custom-built APIs for several direct connect distribution platforms. This way, we helped our client to provide relevant details on hotels & resorts, flights, cars, as well as other popular types of bookings.
Our team has built a real-time data aggregator for a B2B model that receives and stores relevant information on bookings and cancellations from numerous external sources.
We handled the storing and processing of information on bookings and continue to maintain the connection with vendors that offer relevant options, for example, Hilton, BestWestern, IHG, Accor, Holiday Inn, and more. To maximize the benefit, our engineers also implemented instant notifications to inform interested parties about changes associated with placed or canceled reservations, current pricing, new offers, and more.
This approach improves efficiency, enhances automation, and ensures data accessibility within an extensive network.
We covered:
a. Market analysis
b. Approach selection and validation
c. Software development
– Custom API to simplify hotel navigation (booking, cancellation, price and offer tracking)
– Custom API to simplify flight navigation (booking, cancellation)
– Custom API to aggregate multiple vendors in one single place to ease reservation management
– Custom API for notifications on availability and pricing
d. Product support and maintenance
Main challenges
Ensuring uninterrupted request processing
We created a custom multi-threaded solution sending requests to vendors at regular, predetermined intervals. This way, we minimized the time it takes to update relevant prices.
What’s more, we implemented information caching on the server side to accelerate information transmission. That way, when detecting repeated requests with the same parameters, we can transfer details much faster and send instant notifications on changes in pricing.
Minimizing daily server load
We faced the problem that oftentimes hotel chains don’t provide necessary information on one single request. In case of large-scale hotel chains, that means that obtaining up-to-date information on availability and pricing might require multiple requests.
For example, if the hotel chain is operating 50 facilities, we need to send 50 requests to collect relevant details on the defined parameters, which requires significant resource-allocation and poses additional challenges.
To resolve this problem, we designed and implemented a solution to minimize the load on the vendor’s server. In brief, the solution is sending the requests only once a day at night, after which relevant details are updated once or twice during the day in dependence on whether important changes have occurred.
What’s more, to boost the efficiency of the whole process, the information is updated for several days ahead. This means, if any important changes (bookings, cancellations) may occur, the information is updated one time to minimize the number of requests and eliminate the chance of lockout.
Ensuring security
To provide appropriate security to the SOAP API, we added security tokens.
Unifying different, non-uniform responses
To provide heterogeneous responses, we implemented a solution that allows unifying responses received from different vendors.
Tools and technologies
Tech stack:
- Java
- String
- Hibernate
- Mongo DB
- Docker
- Java Spring
- REST API
- SOAP API
Cloud services:
- AWS S3
- AWS EKS
Timeline:
- April 2022 – December 2022
Team:
- 1 project manager
- 1 frontend engineer
- 2 backend developers
Value delivered to business
The client can use the solution to reach potential customers across different travel and lifestyle verticals:
- Service suppliers (hotel chains, airlines, rentals, golf courses, spa facilities)
- Service resellers (tour operators, receptive operators, products aggregators, marketing organizations)
Respectively enjoying:
- Routine automation &
- Facilitated data accessibility to improve business efficiency
- Greater potential customer reach
- Streamlined revenue and growth
The company that uses our aggregator can eliminate the need to contact each hotel by using separate requests. Our solution, using one API only, can gather and process up-to-date information from the whole network, saving time and cost.
Our team can cover API integration to provide business leaders across industries with reliable, relevant data. Open travel API and payment gateway API integration, as well as online transportation booking API integration to optimize government digital services (GDS), and more.
Contact Us
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