HotelCard - https://hotelcard.com
Custom portal development for Award Winning Swiss web portal for selling cards for booking hotel rooms at 1/2 price
HotelCard and what is unique about it?
It is a unique venture whose objective is to promote tourism in different European countries by achieving better room occupancy rates and making attractive hotel offers available to potential guests. Hotel Card is the world’s first 50% discount card for hotels. Potential customers need to buy a ‘Hotel card’ which allows you to stay at hundreds of hotels in different countries of Europe for half-price
As Hotelcard gained widespread acclaim, new opportunities emerged, leading to the introduction of innovative features. However, the existing content management system (CMS) struggled to keep pace with these evolving demands.
In response, the decision was made to transition to the more robust Laravel framework. Entrusted with the technical reins of HotelCard, Soft Solutions4U (SS4U) embarked on the task of rebuilding the portal from scratch, harnessing the power of this cutting-edge technology.
TECHNICAL CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS
Technology Stack
The new Technology Stack consisted of Laravel, October CMS, MySQL and PHP
Laravel Framework – Frontend
OctoberCMS – Backend
MySQL Database
API integration with HotelSpider, Yield Planet, Vertical Booking
Numerous API integration were needed. A meticulous examination was conducted for each existing plugin. Comprehensive code analysis guided the customization process to seamlessly align them with version 2.1.10. Furthermore, the default view of the Admin Backend Login page was tailored to enhance user experience. API Integration We seamlessly integrated five-channel managers – ‘HotelSpider,’ ‘YieldPlanet,’ ‘VerticalBooking,’ ‘Kognitiv,’ and ‘RateDock’ – into the HotelCard framework. This was accomplished through various methods, including HTTP RAW POST and SOAP, based on the requirements of each manager. The PUSH method was uniformly adopted across all managers to facilitate updates to rates, inventory, and booking information.
Crafting Unique Algorithms
Ingenious algorithms were developed to spotlight the finest hotel deals on the homepage. A user-friendly dropdown menu enabled the filtering of these deals based on ‘Today’ (default), ‘This weekend,’ and ‘custom date range’ options. Moreover, a distinct algorithm empowered the sale of hotel rooms with varying discount rates, contingent on room inventory. Hoteliers were empowered to configure different pricing algorithms based on different time periods.
Other Technologies
- 1 Laravel for the Frontend development
- 2 JQuery for Frontend
- 3 October CMS for the Backend Administration and Dashboard.
October CMS Upgrade
Enhancing the Admin Backend Challenge: While the Front-End of HotelCard was intricately intertwined with the Laravel Framework, the backend relied on the older version 1.x.x of October CMS. The objective was to introduce enhancements and novel features, necessitating an upgrade of the CMS.
Enhancing Elastic Search Functionality
Revamping the search functionality was a pivotal task. Our mission encompassed implementing the ability to select additional services (such as breakfast, extra bed, etc.) during hotel room bookings. These services featured distinct price options, and multilingual support was a crucial requirement.
SS4U team has done an excellent job in implementing and enhancing our e-commerce platform. Hotelcard is working very closely with their dev team and this close collaboration has paid off for us. Looking forward to continuing this fruitful partnership.
Claudio Grisch
C.E.O. Hotelcard AG
