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

Customer Profile

Air Canada Vacations (ACV) is one of Canada’s premier tour operators, and a key subsidiary of Air Canada, Canada’s largest airline. With a wide selection of vacation packages across hundreds of global destinations, ACV offers a complete suite of travel products including flights, hotels, cruises, car rentals, and more. Through its alliance with the Star Alliance aviation group, ACV provides unmatched access to worldwide destinations, focusing on personalized customer experiences.

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.

Firstly, 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 aggregating 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 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.