Client
With over 14 years of activity as a travel agency, Travelplanner is one of the top travel agencies from Romania, with more than 150,000 clients.
The company is specialised in destinations like Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey and Austria and organised more than 30,000 holidays for their tourists.
Travelplanner has an incredible 98% of tourists who rated their services with a positive rank.
Challenge
Old web platform with performance issues and lack of technical support.
The former website was having performance issues and the company wanted a new and fresh image in the context of a rebranding and a scaling process.
Another challenge for the company was to find skilled developers capable to rewrite a complex project and also to manage such a team and process, not being specialized in software development.
We built from scratch a new web platform focused on search engines performance, but using the existing API of a core system responsible for hotels data and price management. We also built a custom CMS for their frontend specific content structure.
Web Platform – The Website
It is a well designed website where tourists can search for destinations, resorts or specific hotels. Search results contain hotel information and special offers or exact prices in case of specific search.
Content Management System (CMS)
Having a very custom content structure, we built this module so content editors of the website to easily create and update pages, edit SEO data or create dedicated landing pages.
Blog for Content Marketing
API for Real Time Synchronization
Because the website is just a frontend of the complex system and data behind any platform dealing with hotels, we created an API responsible for some real time updates about hotels and pricing, reducing the pressure on the backend API.
A feature that allows users to bookmark or save hotels they are interested in. Users can revisit their saved hotels anytime for future bookings or to compare options.
This functionality notifies users when the price of a specific hotel or travel package changes. Users can set criteria for price changes and receive alerts via email.
A secure area where registered users can access their personal account information, booking history, and manage reservations. Authentication ensures user data remains private and secure.
A comprehensive contact page, including options like email forms, phone numbers, and FAQs. This page may offer direct assistance and detailed information for user inquiries.
Different desktop and mobile interface – for a better user experience on any device. We used different stylesheets for different screen resolutions to optimize the CSS file size.
We created a dedicated team to implement from scratch the new frontend along with the CMS and the API. After launching, two developers remained on the project to implement new features and offer support.
The collaboration went well from the beginning because the client ‘s Product Owner had a good technical understanding, but also because we had a great communication with their senior developer who was in charge of developing their core system API and nevertheless because they had a detailed design of the new frontend.
After setting up the specifications and architecture, our 2 full-stack developers, 1 QA engineer and Scrum Master along with client Product Owner and backend developer formed an Agile team who delivered a first version in less than 5 months.
We used Scrum so we had daily status meetings wit the whole team and also worked in sprints of 2 weeks, having Sprint Planning and Sprint Review in each sprint. Here too, Slack was our internal communication channel and Asana was the task and backlog management tool.
After delivering the new web platform, we continued to implement new features but also offer support. Because Travel Planner is a growing business who constantly innovates, the backlog is a living list and the development team remained on the project for a long term collaboration.
