Case Study. Host Agency Travel Agency Network

Transcription

1 Case Study Host Agency Travel Agency Network

2 01 Client Background The client is a host travel agency network in the North American market. Purpose Based on market analysis, the client wanted to equip home-based agents with training and tools to help them become effective travel agents for serving their local market and references. Challenges Based on the client s market promise, the client wanted the following in a short duration of time: To go to market within 3 months To equip and train home-based agents in a short period of time To increase their host agency network and reduce training time Customer Requirements An easy to use online CMS based site builder in order to reduce training time It needed to integrate with all the popular travel search engines in the market They wanted easy onboarding and support for restricting some parts of the sites They also wanted a central way to control\push changes to all affiliate sites To equip agents with the ability to customize their sites along with SEO features

3 02 tavisca s Contributions and Work Profile Initiated in April, 2014 the project started with a 2 member team that was ramped-up to 8 members, by the project delivery date in July, Tavisca Solutions provided an end-to-end technical solution that included the following: Engineering - Proposed customizing the existing products to fulfil all the requirements. They used tavisca s CMS, back office and identity management products for implementing the full system. Integrations - Explored and integrated with 3rd party travel sources for products like Packages, Cruises, Hotels, Cars, Activities and Insurance. Design - tavisca s creative team worked with the client s designers for extending and building the HTML and online content changes flow. Quality Assurance - Includes functional, usability, browser and performance testing. Documentation - Our technical writing team created user manuals and online demos for training the admins and affiliates.

4 03 Technical Approach The system was designed with a two level hierarchy support. It allowed the client to control and push changes from the parent site to all child sites when required. All affiliate sites were created based on the parent template with control on what changes could be made. Each end level site allows administrators to change the allowed site sections on the fly with the ability to customize their branding, upload images, videos, select page templates, set SEO settings and be able to manage site menus. The back office allowed the client s admins to onboard new affiliates, setup their basic site, setup custom domains, create admin users and configure notifications as needed. This flow was simplified to reduce the training time and help in onboarding affiliates at a faster pace. The portal was made in ASP.NET with Web APIs based REST services. It was hosted on AWS so that it could be scaled on demand. Where needed new widgets were created which customized the flow and enabled real-time editing capabilities. Multiple domains, browsers and configuration based testing and reviews were also done.

5 O4 Technical Architecture The following diagram is a visual representation of the different layers of the system architecture:

6 O5 Technical Architecture The different layers of the system are: 1. Presentation Layer: All sites were built on tavisca s CMS that allows domain-based sites to serve as a setup for branding customization, admin login, online page customizations and flow changes, additionally new widgets were created and added to the application. Google Analytics was integrated here to generate traffic and usage reports. Access control, caching, AJAX support and client level validations were done in this layer. 2. UI Services: This layer exposes functionality as REST-based Web API. This layer implements all business workflow based rules depending on the type of site and allowed configurations. UI widgets are the primary consumers of these services and are setup based on configurations done in the back office. 3. Persistence Layer: This layer communicates primarily with our identity product services that implement hierarchy based configuration resolution and data retrieval. All the heavy lifting is done in the identity services, so this layer is pretty thin.

7 O6 Product Components 1. CMS Capability: a. Page Creation - This allows new page creation based on templates. b. Search Widgets - We created a search widget for supporting various types of third party providers with different display support capabilities. c. Menu Handling - This allows a multi-level menu to be created per site. d. Editor - It is a rich text editor with the ability to manage page content such as images, text, fonts, etc. in real-time. e. Upload Handling - This provides an S3 based file storage system with common and a shared folder type setup. f. SEO Capability - This allows controlling various site and page level SEO settings like titles, URLs, Meta tags, smart tags, etc. g. APIs in this category are related to user account and profile management. These store all user and his device related data.

8 O7 2. Hierarchy Capability: This was built on top of tavisca s identity and profile services and allows the two-level site structure so that changes can be easily managed and pushed across multiple sites. 3. Back Office: a. This allows administration of the full system along with the ability to onboard new affiliates with a simple wizard-based flow. b. It also provides affiliates and their site configuration management capability for parent level administrators. 4. Affiliate Level Admin Logins: a. All end level sites have a login flow that allows site admins to login. b. Post login the site admins can customize the site in-line and without moving to a back-end tool. This shortens the customization cycle and also significantly reduces the training time. Anyone with basic web skills can become a site admin and effectively manage their site. 5. Reviews and Ratings: APIs in this category are related to generating and organizing user generated content such as reviews and ratings. 6. Integrations: a. A central integration system was designed to help integrate new 3rd party providers. b. This greatly helped in reducing time for adding over 5 travel search providers. 7. Request Flow: This capability was added for enabling a request based flow, so agents can take queries offline, launch contests or get feedback from end users.

9 O8 8. Ad Support: a. Since many sites were being created, it was felt that ads would be a good way to monetize. The ads needed to be controlled only by the parent. b. This module helped set-up various types of text, images and mixed ads with support for a time-based display, scrolling, and random strategies. Technologies Used Operating System: Windows \ AWS Framework:.Net 4.5 Technology: jquery, JavaScript, HTML5, ASP.NET, Web APIs Cache: AWS Elastic Cache Database: MSSQL 2012 Application & Web Server: IIS 8

10 Tavisca Solutions, a travel technology products and solutions provider that works with (B2B, B2C and B2B2C) travel companies across the globe and helps them enhance their online business. With the vision to build future-focused technology building blocks that solve key challenges in online travel business, tavisca offers a versatile suite of cloud-based SaaS products, deciphering every aspect of customer and agent-facing booking engines, travel mid & back-office operation management systems. Established in 2008, tavisca has emerged into a team of travel technology specialists with over 300 dedicated personnel and three state-of-the-art development centers in India and the United States of America. Today, tavisca continues to soar at its position amongst the top 100 GPTW list of best places to work in India, for three consecutive years. tavisca s core offering travelnxt is a PCI PA-DSS compliant online travel booking management software that works across Air, Hotel, Car, Deals, Activities, Transfers and Insurance with a Strong Booking Engine, Static Package Builder and Inventory Management System. Annually, tavisca s travel technology empowers more than a million online travel bookings globally. For sales contact: sales@tavisca.com For press and media contact: beacon@tavisca.com 2015 Tavisca Solutions Pvt. Ltd. 3/18/15