Renovated and Optimized Supplier Data Connectivity for a Leading Canadian Travel Company

Customer Profile

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.

Provided Solutions

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:

• Java backend developers;
• XML / XSLT engineers responsible for travel supplier API integration;
• A project manager supervising the implementation process.

The key implementations introduced by the team are described below.

GP Travel HUB Implementation

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.

Extranet solution

Apart from modified supplier integration flows, ACV required additional functionality that would help their staff to:

• Create and manage direct hotel supplier offers manually;
• Manage travel product quantities and availability data;
• Create and modify travel offer content.

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.