Tailor-made Supplier Connectivity for an Innovative Business Travel Management Platform

Customer Profile

Roomex is a dynamic and fast-growing company focussed on providing innovative business travel management service. Headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, the company operates a B2B platform enabling corporate travel managers and individual travelers from numerous corporate entities to book accommodation at a click of a button, manage travel expenses and related reporting.

In order to facilitate an extensive travel management service, Roomex aggregates thousands of hotel offers from over 30 suppliers globally. In addition, the company distributes its own exclusive travel service rates. What’s more, Roomex’s platform consolidates all the purchased travel products into a single invoice, saving time and effort on routine travel management activities. The platform is also furnished with tailor-made analytics that assists in cost-saving decisions on future bookings.

Provided Solutions

The project started in 2014. Below is an outline of key developments that took place during the implementation phase.

GP Travel Hub Implementation

The key project objective for Roomex was fast connection to numerous accommodation suppliers. However, connecting each of them separately one by one would be a massive time-consuming effort.

To avoid this, the project team of GP Solutions introduced supplier integration architecture based on GP Travel Hub – a unified travel API aggregation product designed and developed by GP Solutions.

Moving forward with GP Travel Hub turned out to be a smart decision concerning the project objectives and circumstances. Using this product was very beneficial, as it provided:

• A well-documented unified Accommodations API facilitating structured aggregation and sourcing of data from multiple suppliers simultaneously;
• A range of ready-made supplier connections which could help lower the development costs.

Also, for more convenience to Roomex, GP Travel Hub implementation and development of new supplier connections were separated into a new independent development branch. In addition to more productivity and flexibility for Roomex, this approach also enabled the Client to duly comply with the specific legal requirements imposed by Irish state authorities.

The API aggregator version delivered to the Client had its unique technical and business requirements. In particular, project developers designed and deployed a number of additional API methods for enhancing performance and productive capacity of GP Travel Hub.

Most notable among these methods are the following:

• ‘LightSearch’ – a search method for quickly finding the cheapest room in the given hotel / location;
• ‘Multibooking’ method for booking several rooms with a single book request;
• ‘MassRetrive’ method for receiving updates on multiple bookings via a single request;
• ‘Modify’ API method for introducing various changes to booking requests.

After all the modifications were done, the GP Travel Hub version for Roomex boosted to a new level of performance with regard to the specific requirements of the Client.

Moving forward, GP Solutions team also had to find a workaround for the issue with static data from suppliers. These included images, text descriptions, various graphics, extra services and so on. As the static content quality varied from one supplier to another, a rational solution was to form a common database of high-quality content to use for all the properties available for sale.

Performance tracking and support implementations

Upon initial release of GP Travel Hub in production, our team moved on with further scheduled enhancements.

Firstly, we had to design customer-specific reporting and performance tracking functionality. Its main purpose was to indicate how well each individual supplier connector was performing. Solving this task, our team launched a set of custom analytical dashboards based on MS Azure. This platform enabled our team to deploy high-quality visualization of connection status for each supplier, with detailed tracking and display of all changes and operational malfunctions.

Furthermore, our engineers launched a tailor-made supplier status notification system. In case of any issue, a separate team of developers engaged in support would receive an instant notification. Once any supplier delayed response, it would be disabled in the Hub to limit the negative impact on the aggregate response time from all the connected suppliers.