Case Study | South American Tours
A Brand New Easy-to-Use Booking System
OUR CLIENT
South American Tours (SAT) is a leading destination management company in South America, operating since 1973. It is a privately owned company with fully-owned local offices in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Uruguay, supported by sales offices in Frankfurt and North America.
SAT offers customized tours and travel arrangements to South America for groups or individual travelers, including roundtrips, packages, incentive travel or cruise handling. In addition to the customized programs, our client offers fixed group tours with guaranteed departure dates.
THE CHALLENGE
SAT used to register all tour bookings in an out dated system, complemented by Excel files. That is, after receiving reservations via e-mail or over the phone, they manually entered them in the corresponding file. Given their wish to change this methodology, SAT engaged us to develop a “brand new booking engine” to automatize clients’ requests and, thus, replace the “old way of doing things”.
OUR ACTION
As per our client request, we developed a web application called “SIC Bookings”. It makes the booking management process easier, and provides the following functionalities:
Administrative backend
- Management of tour templates (Master SICs), with specification of the sale price and itinerary. Those travel agencies obtaining a rate discount are included in this section.
- Support of different sale values: per SIC, client, trip.
- Discount support.
- Management of tours created on the basis of a particular template (Master SIC). This section indicates the start date and whether confirmation of the reservations made by SAT is required or not. A functionality to associate accommodation and flights to the tour is also included.
- Management of accommodation, indicating the city, dates and availability according to the type of room chosen.
- Management of flights, including information such as flight code, city of origin, destination, date of departure and available seats.
- Customization of tours, with an option to change the itinerary, price, travel agencies receiving benefits, etc. of a tour in particular without affecting the remaining tours or the associated template (Master).
- Management of destinations, cities and countries.
- Management of travel agencies working with SAT.
- Management of users of the travel agencies operating with SAT.
- Tours status.
- A functionality to publish tours once confirmed, including the deadline to make the reservations, and being visible to the travel agencies (frontend). A tour is confirmed upon availability of accommodation and flights, if required, on the start date and duration.
- A functionality to depublish a tour, with the possibility to modify it (customization) for its subsequent republication.
- Management of bookings, with the possibility to visualize, confirm or reject reservations.
- Rooming Report per tour, export to Excel with the data of such tour’s reservations made by the different travel agencies.
Frontend, only accessible by the travel agencies established by SAT
- Management of searches of flexible tours, per date, country, name, duration.
- Visualization of the tour itinerary, with the possibility to check availabity based on the number of travelers entered in order to make the pertinent reservation.
- Bookings of tours, including a detail of the type of accommodation and each traveler’s information.
- List and search of the reservations made by each travel agency, with the possibility to visualize the details of the tour and each traveler’s information.
- Backend and frontend multi-language support.
- Security/Login.
- User management.
Below are the main technical specifications:
- The system has been designed in an adaptative manner, to be adjusted to the different types of devices from where it can be currently accessed (PC, tablets).
- It is a web solution in SaaS mode (Software as Service).
- The server is hosted in the data center chosen (and maintained) by the client, where the Web Server and the Database run.
- The software can scale easily to run in a web farm and a database cluster.
TECHNOLOGIES
- Java, Spring MVC, Struts
- JUnit
- MySql
- Bootsrap, jQuery, HTML5, CSS3
LINKS
http://www.southamericantours.com/
https://www.facebook.com/southamericantours/timeline/
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