Azure based tour operator application

Problem:

The contemporary plethora of internet is encouraging self-packaging of holidays. On a contrary, individuals do not have time to sketch and negotiate best holiday deals. The contracting power with airline, hotels and other suppliers and influence over government and other private tourism boards to create lucid packages has still maintained the aptitude of tour operators in arranging the tours for individuals who do not have time and need a exotic, budgeted holiday planner.

The client also wanted such tour operator web application to offer wide range of services including Hotel Rooms, Shows, group travel &events with complementary transportation, dining, nightlife, Tours and Attractions to Travel Partners around the globe with the virtue of their local connections and concierge service to all customers needs to make the travel better, cheaper and longer.

However to deserve the loyalty and money, the website must provide a service that is better, faster and more affordable and hence give the best and lightning fast travel booking experience to deliver experience, not just price.

Solution:

Sveltoz then built a windows azure based online travel operator website to provide end to end travel solutions and deliver value to customers who are seeking the perfect travel experience.

As this website is available to everyone, it needs to be scalable enough to handle large volumes of website traffic on demand with a good web experience.

Hence the application was hosted on the Windows Azure cloud platform from Microsoft, to take advantage of the platforms:

• Elasticity
• Dynamic secured environment
• On demand compute and storage to host, scale and manage the web applications on internet through Microsoft data centers.

The application allows various business entities – Hotel/ Hotel chain, travel agency, OTA’s , tour operators to be partnered / registered with the company.

The Admin could add all these agents to the application, add different users and add various promotions (discount, value add, free nights, resort fee) against various hotels.

The business entities registered to the application could then search for various hotels, unprecedented list of shows with competitive pricing and thus provide variety of comprehensive tours and packages to their customers. The detailed customer records and customer travel records / reservations made under different agents are securely stored and could be searched through on demand.

There is also flair to schedule jobs to automate the notifications and responses.

One of the key attributes of the application was data. As time passes, data grows immensely attributed to different sources, different devices and different systems. To address the growing size and scale of the data – Sveltoz adopted the cloud based SQL Azure database to address the primary data challenges associated to manageability, scalability and availability.

With Azure platform the various entity search (comprising of thousands of transaction searches, through hundreds of available options) and customer bookings were accomplished at lightning speed with just a click.

Key Business impact:

• The business shifted from having multiple small silos of computing power to moving that ‘brain’ to centralized locations.
• The enormous scalability offered by Windows Azure, ensured customers/ travel agents from around the world access the website services reliably.
• Due to the faster time-to-market and a flexible development environment, the company could experiment with new offerings and enhance the customer experience.
• The "pay as you go/pay as you grow" approach of cloud based infrastructure let the business respond more quickly to changes in the customers' needs.
• The database processing power was potentially increased and the company experienced a colossal trim in database costs.
• It avoids cost of purchasing and configuring servers and testing functionality. It provided flexibility, scalability, 24*7 availability with reduced capital expenses and lower cost of ownership.

Key Implementation Challenges:

• Importing hotel details, room rates, availability etc from multiple different providers and displaying all together in one list.
• Implementing on the fly reservation of dynamic room rates and availability without prior import.

Key success factors:

• It reduced the time to add/procure servers to company’s own data centers, and balance the load requirements to ensure scalability of the infrastructure.
• Reduced the burden on on-premises infrastructure. The enormous scalability and reliability of Windows Azure allowed a large volume of traffic to be handled with ease without any additional coding.
• Windows Azure provided facilities for monitoring server performance, memory usage, CPU usage and was scalable enough with its global availability.
• The travel application could be easily/quickly deployed on the Windows based Azure platform using the tools provided by Microsoft.
• Azure being a self managed, multitenant relational cloud database, provided built in high availability, fault tolerance to build the web application.

Technologies used:

• Microsoft .Net Framework 3.5
• Microsoft Azure DB
• Azure server
• C#, Asp.Net, MVC 3, Bootstrap