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

Technology Used

1.October CMS Upgrade – Admin Backend

Challenge:

While the Front-End of HotelCard was coded on Laravel Framework, the backend was designed on October CMS. However, the CMS was running on an older version 1. x.x.

To enhance and add new features the CMS needed to be upgraded.

The challenge was to tweak and ensure all existing plugins were compatible with the Latest Build 2.1.10

Solution:

We analyzed all the existing Plugins. Checked the codes in detail and

customized to version 2.1.10.

The Admin Backend Login page default view was also customized

2.API Integration

We integrated the five-channel managers ‘HotelSpider’, ‘YieldPlanet’, ‘VerticalBooking’, ‘Kognitiv’ and ‘RateDock’ into the HotelCard. The channel managers ‘HotelSpider’, ‘YieldPlanet’ integration API were implemented using HTTP RAW POST and the ‘VerticalBooking’ was done with SOAP. In all the channel managers, we implemented the PUSH method to update the Rates, Inventory, Stop sell room level, Stop sell rate plan level and push the reservation and cancel booking details to channel managers.

3.Major Bug fixes in the Elastic Search

The Search functionality needed to be modified to implement the following functionality: Provide the additional services(eg: breakfast, extra bed, kids bed,…etc ) while booking the hotel rooms. The additional services had different price options: “Per guest and night”, “per guest and stay”, “per night” and “per stay”. These functions also had multi-lang support.

4.Unique Algorithm

Unique algorithm was implemented to display the top best deal hotels on the home page with the dropdown option to filter out the best deal hotels, as per three filters ‘Today'(default option), ‘This weekend’, and ‘custom date range’.

Another algorithm was implemented to sell the hotel rooms on different discount rates based on the room inventory and also the hotelier was given the authority to set different pricing algorithms based on the different time periods.