Air Canada Vacations (ACV) is one of the leading Canadian tour operators and a founding member of Air Canada – Canada’s largest airline and the biggest provider of scheduled passenger services in the Canadian, Canada-U.S. transborder and the international market, servicing destinations to and from Canada.
The company builds and offers a variety of vacation packages for hundreds of destinations in the Caribbean, Mexico, Central and South America, Europe, Asia, the South Pacific, the USA and Canada – all the destinations covered by Air Canada airline and other members of Star Alliance aviation group. In addition to flight tickets, ACV provides a wide selection of hotels, flights, cruises, day tours, car rentals and a set of other travel products. The focus is always on delivering solutions that would fit specific individual needs of each customer.
Prior to partnering with GP Solutions, ACV already established profound technical infrastructure. Having been operating on the online travel booking market for many years, the company managed to develop and launch its own travel automation platform along with a highly functional customer-facing web-based booking solution, mobile-optimized interfaces and apps.
Being a modern and dynamic travel business constantly looking for innovation to improve operations and performance, ACV developed and was gradually implementing an ongoing software renovation plan. One of their key pain points was the travel supplier management functionality. For this reason special interest on ACVs side was to find a software vendor that could offer solutions to:
The cooperation between GP Solutions and AVC started in 2009. After initial research and evaluation it was decided to launch the development phase.
First of all, GP Solutions put together and allocated a team of dedicated development specialists which consisted of:
The key implementations introduced by the team are described below.
Prior to moving on with the travel supplier integration pipeline agreed with ACV, it was necessary to prepare a solid technological foundation for the entire process. It was decided to make use of GP Travel Hub – a time-tested unified travel API aggregation software, a proprietary product of GP Solutions.
The structure of GP Travel Hub involves a set of APIs split by product type: Hotel API, Flight API, Activities API and so on. All of them allow to aggregate travel product data from multiple travel vendor APIs simultaneously by bringing data into a unified data format according to OTA (Open Travel Alliance) standard. This way our team managed to significantly optimize the workload required for making integrations. Now by integrating just a single product API ACV could instantly access to numerous suppliers available via the Hub.
As a result ACV connected to over 20 different travel product suppliers. The company sourced travel content from over 200 000 hotels and more than 20 000 offers related to ground travel services. At the same time GP Travel Hub implementation had the capacity to sustain high system loads covering thousands of look-to-book requests and bookings on a daily basis.
Apart from modified supplier integration flows, ACV required additional functionality that would help their staff to:
Following the provided requirements GP team suggested implementing a custom Extranet system. The solution that was ultimately developed was able to cover all of the requirements mentioned above. It provided efficient functionality to handle travel product allotments, multiple product pricing policies and options – and so on and so forth. It also facilitated efficient mapping functionality helping deduplicate conflicting content versions related to one and the same hotel.
GP Solutions team managed to provide efficient support of the project for over a decade. The efforts undertaken ensured smooth operation and stable access to an enlarged database of travel products for the tens of thousands of travellers using Air Canada Vacation services on a regular basis.
Once the solutions planned for ACV were rolled out, the updated service started gaining positive reviews and trust both among businesses and individual travelers. It all resulted in higher overall standard of business process automation and service.
“The ACV team is very happy with quick release cycles and GP Solution’s willingness to support us with any test and fix system issues. I see what the team does and it is highly appreciated.
Air Canada Vacations plans to continue and expand co-operation with GP Solutions in the future and is currently holding negotiations on a new project.”
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