Business Need

Our client is a Travel consortium with member agents working in various travel verticals. They needed a B2B portal that could be used by their counter staff to search and book for Flights, Hotels, Cars, Insurance.

The Client

The client is Interserve Travel Pvt. Ltd. Interserve is one of India’s Global Brand in Travel/Tourism/Aviation industry. With 50 offices across India that includes 35 IATA locations at present and with foot hold in 17 countries, their claim for a Global Travel Brand is indeed valid. With strategic tie-ups with Airlines, CRS providers, LCCs, Hotel Content providers and other Travel suppliers Interserve is poised to scale greater heights in the coming years. With the launch of this online portal Interserve aims to provide their partners with the right tool to harness this global opportunity.

The Challenge

The major challenge in this project is the integration of the various suppliers and their inventories. Each of them have their own standards and structures and we needed to bring them onto a common platform before we could implement the strategy. Another unique challenge was the provision for multiple GDS/CRS integration by which users of various CRS can see the results in a single page.

	Scalable, reliable model that should be able to handle growth in traffic and data.
	To provide ease of switching between CRS’s like Galileo and Amadeus.
	Should have provision to bring combined results of CRS & LCC’s together.
	Provision to integrate with 3rd party Travel accounting or MIS applications.
	Provide for utmost data and transaction security using Verisign.
	Build GDS similar, total integrated solution that benefits the consumer by providing one set of standards and data structures for each vertical.
	Bring different verticals like Flights, Hotels, Rails, Insurance etc. under a single distribution system.
	Integration of Administration part so that users can do the booking and fulfillment part too.
	Payment Gateway Integration
	Mark-up management module

The Solution

Our team developed a unique API for Interserve by which all the data coming in from different suppliers were consolidated and translated to a single standard. The OTA engine supports the integration of different travel technology suppliers towards a common standard for each vertical, which in turn produce combined results for single window shopping. OTA engine has the plug-in plug-out feature, which helps to turn any API/GDS vendors to be ON/OFF at anytime. It is scalable enough to accommodate any number of API and multiple credentials of them, so that the administrator can customize the access to each API for different travel agencies. Strict guidelines are followed to optimize the OTA framework for high performance and parallel processing. The design standards improve its scalability to quickly accommodate any travel technology/industry changes and supports customization for most of the travel needs.

The Technology

The OTA framework and the application are developed based on the N-Tier Client-Server architecture, which supports multi server deployment and load balancing.