Go24 Travel

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Toughlex
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  • Date Published
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toughlex developed a new product – a website for making flight, accommodation, car, transfer, SPA & Medical Treatment bookings.

Context

Established by tourism professionals in 2009, Tour Operator Firmus Baltic aims to provide high-quality services throughout Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Russia, and Belarus. Working internationally truly smart Firmus Baltic team noticed the demand for a B2B booking platform. They visualized web platform, which allowed travel agencies to book flights, hotels, transfers, cars, SPA & Medical Treatment. All travel services in one place. Firmus Baltic team was not hesitating a lot and decided to implement their wonderful idea – Go24.Travel.

Project Goal

The main goal of the project was to create a primary version of Go24.Travel platform, which would be ready to scale. Moreover, there were few challenging requirements:

  • Integration with multiple providers must be implemented and duplicates must be prevented in search results
  • All financial calculations must be correct keeping in mind different currencies and laws internationally
  • Performance is a priority
  • Scalability is a priority

Solution

As the project demanded a high-quality solution we devoted extra attention to technical decisions. The solution is greatly designed from different angles:

  • Application runtime is based on strong widely used technologies
  • Different databases assure data flexibility and performance
  • System architecture enables the application to scale easily
  • Static code analysis tools assure code is simple to maintain
  • There is more information about technologies used for the project below.

Agile

To be able to keep project progress flexible we used Agile principles. As there were different development phases we used different methods for them:

Scrum was used for the active development phase. We dedicated a team of 5 developers for 4 months to implement huge part of features needed. As the priorities were quite stable, we were able to successfully maintain 2-week sprints along the way. With the help of Scrum we were able to deliver desired features keeping client included, adapt to changing requirements, manage budget & deadlines and continually improve our development process.

Kanban was used for the passive development phase. There was no need for having a dedicated team afterward, because we had to reduce velocity significantly. This is why other features were implemented using our main Kanban board dedicated for miscellaneous small tasks. With the help of Kanban, we were able to keep Go24.Travel development costs low maintaining different scopes at the same time.

Challenges

Some of the obstacles were extremely challenging. Go24.Travel provides the ability to make accommodation bookings around the world, which is complicated, because of different laws and currencies involved. One of the questions raised by developers traveled a long way and reached even Finance Ministry. The answer to this question took a while, but we have flawless calculations in our payment handlers as a result.

Furthermore, there is the core engine, which communicates with multiple booking services providers and offers only the best price to the end customer. There were challenges merging search results because there is no way to perfectly match hotels across different provider databases.

Support

We were glad to hear Firmus Baltic co-founder sharing memories from a recent exhibition, where he was able to talk to one of the accommodation providers representatives. Our client was positively surprised by the support he was getting from representatives. It turns out accommodation providers are suffering from a monopoly in the market and Firmus Baltic is going to make the market better. Also, representatives did not hesitate to send compliments to us, naming toughlex developers as really smart ones, after having a chance to work together on integration.

Technologies

As the project is a really complex and demanding high-quality solution, we chose technologies precisely. The application was implemented using the highly scalable platform – Node.js. It was an extremely suitable option because Node.js is a perfect solution for data-intensive real-time applications due to its I/O model. Moreover, few Google APIs were used to overcome some of the challenging parts.

Multiple storages were used to acquire the best performance. Incredibly quick Redis database was used for cache & geolocation calculations and all other data was conveniently stored in relational MySQL database.

Client-side was implemented using the same technology Google uses for their largest applications – AngularJS. AngularJS has a huge community and public components gallery, that’s why building with AngularJS we were able to implement various features quickly keeping costs low.

Thanks to these technologies the solution is scalable, performing and easy to maintain.

Skills

  • MySQL
  • Node.js
  • Scrum Development
  • Kanban Development
  • Redis
  • Data Analysis
  • AngularJS
  • Requirements Analysis
  • System Architecture
  • Product Development
  • Integration
  • Enterprise Software
  • Project Management

Results

First release for Go24.Travel project was delivered in less than a year having only 4 months of active development. There were various reasons from the business side for some delays, but we were able to manage changing demand in a flexible manner and we are happy to tell that system is up and running at the moment. As results are successful, we are planning further cooperation. The best is yet to come!