Large-scale Backend Development for a Niche OTA Startup

Customer Profile

Book Barbados is a promising startup online travel agency which specializes in promoting and selling various travel services available on the isle of Barbados – a small island country in the Caribbean. The core of the company’s business is the innovative e-commerce and travel marketing platform concept. It is designed to place more client booking funds directly into local businesses’ hands, while offering the opportunity to stand out with a more in-depth and detailed depiction of tourist attractions available in the country.

Development Highlights

GP Solutions team was engaged for the project starting July 2020.

Development efforts were built around GP Travel Enterprise platform. It was offered by our team as the core of the entire implementation. This approach was deemed to be advantageous for the project because GP Travel Enterprise:

• Already contained lots of ready-made modules required by BookBarbados;
• Incorporated a well-structured and documented API, facilitating streamlined connection with custom solutions built by BookBarbados;
• Had a flexible structure which supported unlimited customizations in line with changing needs and requirements.

Below is an outline of key activities performed during the implementation stage.

#2. Discovery Phase / GAP Analysis

Following the setup, it was highly critical to determine the scope of custom development work required to bring the project up to the Client’s expectations. Therefore, our team suggested performing a full-scale initial discovery phase. Among other things, it entailed formalization of the entire scope of technical and business requirements for further analysis and elaboration of solutions to be implemented.

This phase was a joint effort of a Senior Business Analyst and a System Architect from the product team. The result of their work was shaped into a detailed Project Backlog outlining lacking features that had to be developed. Additionally, these features were split into individual tasks for the development team and were accompanied by accurate effort estimates.

#3. Functionality For Travel Product Supplier Management

The range of products BookBarbados planned to offer included flights, hotels, car rentals, excursions, and insurance. Besides, the plan was to get travel product offers from several major sources: direct contracts, extranet and external suppliers. There had to be tech infrastructure that would be appropriate to accommodate all these needs.

Integrations with 3rd-party supplier APIs were handled using HUB module – part of GP Travel Enterprise, serving as the centralized API aggregation system. Our team applied it to cover the entire supply of flights (using numerous vendor APIs), along with an integration of a hotel supplier API, which enriched the hotel inventory.

Direct contracts with suppliers of car rentals, excursions, and hotels were also implemented using the Inventory module. It offered the Client a full grasp over travel product availability and pricing management.  It also brought in handy functionality for managing allotments and detailed product descriptions.

Additionally, the extranet originally designed by BookBrabados was connected to GP Travel Enterprise using its API interface. This way, all travel products created directly by individual local suppliers of BookBarbados were accumulated inside the aforementioned Inventory module, making it the central repository for all travel content available for sale.

#4. Platform API extensions and related backend developments

Due to the nature of this project, which entailed a lot of custom functionality, GP Product Team had to extend the default backend functionality of GP Travel Enterprise and also enrich the API with new features and methods.

In total, there were over 60 custom implementations of various scale and complexity. Some of the most noticeable among them are:

• Custom price breakdown functionality for product types;
• Custom API methods and backend features to supports Cars and Excursions from the extranet of BookBarbados;
• Introduction of additional room type options;
• Creation of specific discount settings based on user device type (mobile / desktop);
• Extended options to apply discounts and extra services based on calendar dates – and many more.

All of these were backend implementations handled by a group of allocated Java engineers. Their effort helped shape up the tech side of the project according to the commercial vision of BookBarbados team and get the first software version ready for launch.