Tech Team Extension and System Enhancements for Retail Brand - Case Study
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Booking Engine SoftwareTravel InventoryOTAsCustom Development

Tech Team Extension and System Enhancements for Travel Subdivision of a Famous Retail Brand

Galeria case cover

Frontend Technology:

JavaScript, Angular, Typescript Node.js, Express Framework

Others:

PHP, MariaDB, Symfony, MVC, Microservice Infrastructure

Backend:

Docker, Swagger, Gulp

Customer Profile

GALERIA Reisen is a young travel company and a 100% subsidiary of GALERIA Karstadt Kaufhof GmbH – an established German retail sales brand. The headquarters are in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany.

The company provides online booking services via its own web-portals. Galleria Reisen also runs offline distribution of travel services through a network of 85 branch offices in top locations across Germany. Standing on the principles of commitment, expertise, experience and honesty, the company aims to offer excellent service to customers in different ways: via stationary travel agencies, on the go or at home.

Galeria Reisen

Project Challenges

Started off in 2019, Galeria Reisen has been a dynamic and quickly evolving project. The online part of business infrastructure was powered by an internal team of software engineers from day one. However, at some point, the management decided to extend the team using external resources. They were looking to:

  • continue and accelerate the development process;
  • and improve software quality thanks to know-how from an established software vendor.

After some market research and investigation, Galeria approached GP Solutions – a fellow Germany-based company with the suitable travel technology expertise, – to allocate additional software development experts. Under the supervision of the internal management team at Galeria our engineers were expected to quickly get to terms with the current project status and give a new impetus to frontend / backend engineering and QA activities.

Provided Solutions and Services

The cooperation between GP Solutions and Galeria started in 2020 with allocation of 4 tech specialists: 1 backend engineer, 2 frontend engineers and a QA automation testing specialist. The key objective for our tech specialists was to partially redesign and enhance the functionality of existing customer’s software developed by the in-house team. The overall system design utilized microservice architecture – a variant of service-oriented software structure which arranges applications as a collection of individual fine-grained services, each serving its specific function as part of a common infrastructure.

After passing through the introductory period, our team actively engaged in project development. The range of activities entailed:

  • Frontend development for customer-facing B2C portals: galeria-reisen.de and urlaub.de;
  • Ongoing development of booking engine functionality;
  • Development of various business-critical system services.

Now, a bit more detail on each of the mentioned project aspects.

Booking Functionality

One of the key areas of project development consisted in redesigning and enhancement of booking functionality. It involved backend and frontend components.

On the backend part, the booking flow is built around a core travel service supplier system designated by the Client. Our engineers optimized existing tech functionality and finalized the overall booking flow – from travel service search up to check out and booking processing.

The range of implemented travel services includes booking of accommodations, flights, flight+hotel packages and cruises. Additionally, our engineers provided a custom payment solution engineered with due account of the business process specifics of Galeria Reisen.

On the frontend side, our engineers helped continue the development and enhancement of two key online portals: galeria-reisen.de and urlaub.de.

Galeria Reisen website

Some notable features implemented by our team include:

‘Sparvorteil’ feature

The cornerstone of the entire implementation was GP Travel Enterprise – our ready-made travel automation platform. It set a perfect technology foundation for the entire development by providing well-performing out-of-the-box functionality to numerous important aspects of business.

Galeria Reisen service team

The functionality in its final version highlights the amount of benefit (in %) which a customer can receive for booking a travel service earlier.

Price calendar

This is a specified feature showing the price spread for the selected travel service over a separately defined period of time.

Galeria Reisen price calendar

HolidayCheck Integration

This integration makes sure customers can perform better and more informed choices by considering travel service ratings from HolidayCheck – an established travel service and data vendor focusing on Germany, Austrian and Swiss markets.

Galeria Reisen hotel tickets

Inventory solution

The supply of travel services was based around a travel vendor selected and approved by the management at Galeria and integrated via the appropriate API interface. In order to make sure that travel service data is displayed on the web-portals in a fully-featured form appealing for the end user, we designed a separate inventory service for ancillary travel data. These include extended service descriptions and graphics.

Galeria Reisen travel products

In its final version, the inventory solution:

  • Loads bulk travel service description data into a common database;
  • Facilitates content mapping based on travel supplier IDs and GIATA codes;
  • Allows to create custom fields and add extra service description data manually.

All the implemented features in common make sure that customer-facing travel offers are displayed in full and complete format.

Discount voucher / coupon service

The team at Galeria Reisen frequently runs various discount campaigns with the aim to promote its services and increase the overall sales volume. To introduce more automation and ease of use to this aspect of business, our team implemented a specialized discount voucher management service.

Galeria Reisen voucher admin panelThis solution allows the company to create and manage discounts and special offers that can be applied for customers using various flows. For example, it can be:

  • Periodic issue of discount vouchers for next bookings during the checkout process;
  • Individual generation of discount codes sent separately to customers via email, etc.

Besides coupon generation, the system also contains a reporting and analytics module. It enables system administrators to generate informative reports with insightful voucher stats: # vouchers generated, average voucher booking value and more.

Project Results

The cooperation started off in 2020 and is still going strong as of 2023.

At this point, our team managed to significantly extend the range of online functionality offered by Galeria Reisen to its audience. The booking engine used by the company was renovated and extended. Additionally, our team helped rearrange the overall tech processes at Galeria, contributed to DevOps and automated testing efforts.

There are plans to extend cooperation in the future by introducing more new functional features, integrate more travel suppliers – and so on and so forth.

Benjamin Weller

Benjamin Weller, Head of IT

“GP Solutions continues to produce high-quality outputs thanks to their dedication and commitment to delivering their projects on time. The team is highly adaptable, and internal stakeholders are particularly impressed with their vast industry experience.”

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