GP Travel Enterprise: 15 Years Anniversary Interview

Maria: For 15 years we have tried ourselves in different segments – from SaaS (Software-as-a-Service, a budget model for small companies) to large Enterprise licenses.

At the moment, we have settled on the Enterprise segment, which is the most promising and corresponds to our capabilities and rich product functionality. We have about 30 clients in this segment, including such interesting companies as the Swiss educational and touristic holding EF Tours, the Australian medical tourism company MediStays, the Kazakh client ITP Travel (part of the international holding BCD Group), the Israeli tour operator Atlantis Travel, the Czech Asis Tour and others.

Remarkably, over the past year, 2 companies from Australia have become our clients (independently), so as a result GPTE turned out to be in demand on all continents.

Maria: In total, during the existence of the product, more than 200 connectors to various types of products have been implemented – suppliers of hotels, flights, transfers, excursions, car rentals and insurance. Such a wide range of connectors gives us the opportunity to satisfy any customer needs.

For example, GDS Amadeus and Sabre became the undisputed leaders in flight bookings, and Hotelbeds and Ratehawk – in hotel reservations.

Maria: Yes, definitely these forecasts have come true and now we see a significant influx of bookings from customers. It is worth mentioning that, in fact, only this year we’ve started returning to normal. COVID discounts on license fees are gradually being canceled, and customers are increasingly more capable of paying for services in full.

We continue to monitor the situation and support our clients’ growth. I think the final conclusions can be made in a year or so from now.

Maria: One of its strongest aspects is functional flexibility. It allows not just to sell a “boxed product” which customers have to get used to somehow.  This mode of work enables our team to act as technical consultants and solve clients’ business problems, adjusting the product to existing needs and requirements.

The system can support almost any touristic product – hotels, flights, transfers, excursions, tour packages, insurance, etc. And if that’s not enough, there is “additional services” module (or “universal product”) to create any other type of service and configure the selling rules. You can add options of selling conference rooms, catering, SIM cards, souvenirs along with any other products/services that customers might be interested in.

We also pay attention to extra convenience of use. Our system prompts weather forecasts for tourists along the route of their stay. There are options to download tips and recommendations for cities you plan to visit, save recent searches and view similar hotels based on system recommendations. This way, various tourist challenges can be solved quickly and efficiently.

Maria: I often bring back our struggle of finding an optimal name for our product.

At first, the name we had was “GP Travel Suite”. But the issue with it was that the English word “suite” was typically pronounced as “suit”. After numerous attempts of teaching the team correct pronunciation, we decided it was easier to just change the name. ‘GP Travel Enterprise’ turned out to be an optimal name, as it brought focus to the exact market segment we wanted to work on.

Cate: GP Travel Enterprise consists of several subteams:

• Customer Success Managers responsible for efficient business process automation based on the platform;
• Back-end developers programming the Java core;
• Front-end developers creating customer-facing interfaces and mobile applications;
• QA / testing engineers;
• Customer support department.

Our employees live in different countries and cities. I would especially like to thank those who have been working at GPTE for more than 5 years, and this is every third person of the team. These people have accumulated not only extremely valuable platform knowledge, but also unique expertise in understanding tourism in general.

And one more thing! It wouldn’t be fair to forget mentioning the GP HUB. This is another proprietary product of GP Solutions which automates integration process with travel content providers. A major part of GPTE projects involve active interactions with GP HUB, basically making GPTE and HUB a one common unit working for the clients.

Cate: There are plans to expand the Customer Success Managers subteam and the support department, in particular in locations close to our current and potential customers (Europe, Great Britain, Australia, etc.).

Yegor: The basic GPTE technology is JAVA

Detailed tech stack: Spring, JPA/Hibernate, JDBC, JAXB, jBPM, Drools, JSF, RichFaces, XML/XSLT, JAX-RS/Jersey, Apache Lucene, MySQL, JasperReports, JUnit, Selenium, Maven, Git, Apache Tomcat, Jenkins.

Dmitry: Back in the day the frontend UI was a mixture of Java, PHP, and JavaScript. Now we’ve made a transition entirely to JavaScript and Node.js, utilizing the technology offered by the Vue.js framework.

Yegor: The most interesting thing for me is to work on technical tasks, research, and optimizations. One of the latest challenging things is application clustering. As for functional tasks, I can outline package tours. We already had modules for this segment – dynamic packages and complex tours. But the new packaging module combines flexible configuration with elegant and simple implementation. Based on it, it’s much easier to cover customer needs.

Dmitry: I am interested in implementing and developing applications. I can outline the work we did on automating installations and app updates (Continuous Integration, CI). It was a new challenge for me. It was also exciting to look for and implement technology for flexible app adjustments to customer requirements.

Yegor: The great team behind the product has been a factor for me since day one. Real professionals and just wonderful people. They made me who I am today. It’s been a long time, of course, and many people are no longer parts of the team. But I remember all my colleagues. Our team is the secret and the answer to why I’m still here.

And of course, the project itself. Years go by, the letters change, but what remains unchanged are the challenges that we have to face thanks to the wishes of our customers. And if suddenly they run out of imagination, our VP Maria has so many new ideas which leave you no time to idle around, not to mention getting bored. Product development means constant search for flexible implementations that will help customers with different business models and different ideas of “what’s good and what’s bad” to get along within one unified solution. It’s not easy, but at the same time, it’s very interesting.

Dmitry: I’ve had a lot of breaks for other projects at GP Solutions throughout these 10 years;) And now, after working in custom development, it is very interesting to produce new code with a long life cycle.

Yegor: One might think that for 15 years you can automate everything that needs any automation. But travel business is complex, bottomless, and bloody interesting. Also, the world does not stand still, so we have plenty of tasks to take care of yet. Hand on heart, there are also enough tech optimizations to do on the system. So I wish GPTE will move forward bugless, full of tasks and ideas.

Dmitry:  I wish our product a lot of new wealthy clients and projects. And I am sure our development, implementation, and testing teams can successfully handle and “digest” all of this.