Universal Travel Engine (UTE)

Customer	Travel24.com, Germany http://www.travel24.com
Description	Challenge The internet travel company Travel24.com AG wanted to meet the growing demand for value-added online travel services. Generation_P was chosen as a software outsourcing provider to archive this goal. Cooperation Highlights Our business analysts quickly made requirements analysis. After this, we created design and architecture documents in close cooperation with Travel24.com. Generation_P developed the system completely from the ground up (the back-end, middleware and the front-end). After the development and testing stages were completed, we continued adding new modules and performed maintenance and support of the product. The project team consisted of seven software engineers (six in Minsk and one at customer's site in Bad Dürkheim) Solution Universal Travel Engine (UTE) is a complete turnkey solution for online travel agencies. It retrieves tour offers (flight, hotel and lastminute offers, package tours) from multiple suppliers and processes them. Visitors can search by numerous parameters, access detailed information and book tour offers online. UTE shows price differences between equal travel offers from different sources. It also shows free flight contingent, including flight times and the amount of free places in the contingent. The system supports a customisable interface for subscribed travel agencies. The system supports customizable interface for subscribed travel agencies. Result Today Universal Travel Engine is used by over 30 companies, including: Online travel service www.travel24.com Online travel service www.buchungsmaschine.de Leading travel agency www.reisebuero-blum.de Hamburg airport www.hamburg-airport.de/de/online_buchen.phtml
Technologies & tools	UTE is a J2EE project, using EJB and Servlets, which makes it robust, effective and scalable UTE uses multi-tier architecture that allows easy integration of new search and reservation modules UTE runs on a cluster with sophisticated load balancing. It has been designed to work effectively under heavy load UTE supports multiple database types UTE uses XML/XSL server side transformation based on a combination of Servlet/JSP and XSLT technologies for front-end rendering Search and booking forms are highly customisable UTE uses sophisticated caching of negative / positive availability query results, breaking them into flight and hotel contingents
Time Frame	August 2003 – October 2006
Volume of work	190 man-months
Testimonials	''Specialists of Generation_P have shown not only their high competence, skills, and field knowledge, but also the ability to work under pressure, stick to the defined milestones and deadlines and provide transparency to the part of development process that is carried out remotely.'' Wolfgang Schellenberger, Director IT and Development