About our partner

Our partner is an online travel agency that provides dynamic travel packages to the clients by virtual tour operating. They offer an opportunity to compare prices, choose the best solutions, and book the entire vacation from flights to hotels.  

• Industry: Travel and Leisure
• Market: Netherlands
• Type: Web
• Cooperation with HYS Enterprise: 3 months
• Team size: 3 engineers

About our partner’s challenges

Partner’s clients book flights and hotels at once, and after arrival, they need a transfer from the airport to the hotel or vice versa. Often it involves a shuttle bus shared with other people traveling the same direction or a private transfer like a taxi. The transfer booking option would expand the functionality of the partner’s platform and meet travelers’ needs.

What our partner needed

The project required a connection with two major transfer suppliers to the partner’s virtual tour operation solution. It would enable clients to choose the most affordable ones and book transfer according to their requests, e.g., number of persons, price, private or shared shuttle, direction. 

To implement this option, our partner needed the API that supports a search and a booking method. It should be able to transfer requests from a partner’s side to a transfer provider and filter the results providing the most cost-effective option out of all. 

Solutions provided

As a result, we designed a full-fledged API that connects to both transfer services and performs the following functions:

• Filtering results on the provider’s sides to ensure options that completely match the client’s search. While booking a trip on the partner’s portal, the client can send a request for a transfer, specifying such information as a private or shared shuttle, how many people are traveling, destination, etc. Then API finds relevant information on the side of two providers. 
• Identifying booked airport and hotel. If the client has already booked a flight and a hotel, the information about the time of arrival or location is automatically added by the API as it is already on the portal.
• Searching and suggesting the most profitable option for a shared or private transfer.
• Calculating a pickup time from the hotel to the airport and vice versa according to the flight departure. Since the information about the booked flight and hotel is available for API, it calculates the most convenient time to pick up a client.
• Serving as a layer of security and validation. In other words, it handles all errors that might come from the providers’ side.
• Configuration of the partner’s price margin. 
• Translating information into Dutch, if providers return it in English. The automatic translation may ease the usage of the platform for the clients and make the user experience more convenient since all other information on it is in Dutch.  

To visualize and interact with the API’s resources for testing and troubleshooting, our team used a Swagger – multifunctional tool for API development, testing, and virtualization. So the client received a customizable tool with visualization without the need to look under the hood if something went wrong.

Development methodology:

Agile/Scrum

Technologies

• C#
• .NET core 2.2
• Entity Framework
• Swagger 

Benefits delivered

The API developed by our team has expanded the functionality of the partner’s platform. His clients can find and book a transfer from the hotel to the airport and vice versa when arranging a trip without the need to search it by themselves. Additional features like filtering the cheapest transfers and translating information make the traveling portal more viable and user-friendly. At the same time, a partner can set a price margin, which makes it a profitable solution.