Travel

Overall we achieved 30% savings, at a steep initial cost, which consisted of need to train the new talent in the complexity of our business logic and overall system architecture. Marko Cadez, CEO at Best Travel Store

Discount airfare search is an ever popular theme for web users and despite the fact that the market already has several major brands the challenge remains formidable, so there is always room for specialized search engines.

The client Best Travel Store is a niche online player in the discount airfares and hotels categories. The company was founded in California 2002, with its customer service center and data center located in Los Angeles. They operate a data processing and technology branch in Slovenia, Europe. The www.bt-store airfare engine outperforms competitive solutions offered by major reservation systems in its ability to better search seat availability for locally stored fares based on predefined optimized airline routes. The result is finding lower fares on less popular and often more complex routes.

The company’s core mission is multiple airfare and hotel broker integration through its Microsoft -based open travel architecture, acting as a hybrid meta-search engine and a full travel reservation system at the same time. The benefits to end users are lower prices through combining multiple inventory providers and intelligent search, and access to exceptional traditional travel agency customer service by relying on the company’s extensive reservation and fulfillment system architecture.

Best Travel Store began facing increasing challenges in the technology architecture complexity and simultaneous downward pressure on commissions and upward climb of online advertising costs in 2015. The situation forced the company to rethink how it conducts its core operations, including improving the software development cycle and cutting cost at the same time.

Unfortunately, we could no longer afford the previous team and had to cut radically the work in Slovenia. It must be emphasized, that the future team would have faced a tremendous challenge in the necessity to work with our open platform for searching and pricing and the reservation system, which consists of 68 different projects in a number of solutions. remembers Marko Cadez, CEO at Best Travel Store.

Finding a technology partner with the technical and business expertise who could replace years of investment into research, development and engineer education was a serious challenge, the outcome of which would determine the very survival of the company.

Best Travel Store was determined to find the brightest, best and the most economical team on the market, and they turned to the Internet to seek out the talent.

We published a detailed project requirements job description and requested that each participant submit their very best source code sample to demonstrate their black belt knowledge of coding and architecture. No less would suffice. says Mr. Cadez, CEO at Best Travel Store. We considered other companies in the East, including Russia and India, but none demonstrated the uniquely advanced knowledge of and a hardworking, scientific and disciplined approach to problem solving. As a very hands-on customer, who is deeply involved in day-to-day software development operations, we do not tolerate short sighted architecture design, small and inefficient projects with few measurable results or having inexperienced staff work on demanding tasks. AltexSoft has the right resources available for such a challenge. They are very driven by their passion to succeed. says Marko Cadez, CEO at Best Travel Store.

Best Travel Store decided to take a conservative approach in their development resource migration, by employing a limited amount of staff: two software engineers, one QA engineer and a software architect, who is acting as the team lead, directly responsible for the pace and quality of the team’s work.

The AltexSoft team began their work by refactoring core system architecture, introducing advanced concepts such as inversion of control, thus achieving greatly simplified future development and ease of application configuration. The end result is lower cost of development, maintenance and ownership. Once the team consolidated the system platform they focused on improving the online user experience by upgrading the front-end application, resulting in an improved visit-to-buy conversion rate and consequentially higher company profit .

The User Interface of the Best Travel Store web application:

The team is currently focused on designing and building a state-of-the-art online hotel reservation engine featuring 150K hotels from multiple high volume travel brokers. Before beginning work they established a continuous integration process with the main focus of designing, developing and testing small functional pieces of software. This approach to development resulted in significantly reduced cost and increased speed of final product delivery by ensuring that small, independent and thus manageable software pieces are checked on a typically daily basis, avoiding design flaws and major bugs that usually accompany a less rigorous software development approach.

• Increased visit-to-buy conversion rate through improved graphical user interface.
• Reduced cost of future development, maintenance and ownership through core system refactoring using advanced architecture design.
• Reduced software development cost by 30% by outsourcing to AltexSoft.

The solution we are working on is neither fast nor simple. We deal with searching, processing and ticketing over 75 million airfares on over 300 airlines, searching about 150K hotels worldwide from multiple wholesale suppliers, generating city and airport guide content for hundreds of worldwide locations, all in multiple languages. Overall we achieved 30% savings, at a steep initial cost, which consisted of need to train the new talent in the complexity of our business logic and overall system architecture. This is an ongoing process without a definitive end in sight. We hope to work with AltexSoft for many years to come. summarized Mr. Cadez the current effort, CEO at Best Travel Store.

AltexSoft offers a full cycle of solutions development for specialized search and data mining in the areas of? E-commerce Retail, Travel Booking, Finance Banking, Marketing Advertising Aviation Transportation Systems, etc. We also provide expertise in the field of marketing services and retail sales. AltexSoft specialists provide professional consulting on project management, architecture, information systems and quality management of software products.