Booking Engine Redevelopment
Updated performance, upselling potential
Background
Warner Leisure Hotels were strategically reviewing their web platform. This highlighted that their existing booking engine's technology was showing its age, and related limitations in terms of its scalability to cope with increased numbers of bookings.
Building Blocks were consequently asked to address a number of challenges:
- Improve the booking process, increase conversion and upsell of extras
- Rationalise the business logic which had been 'bolted on' over the years, to deliver stability and make it easy to add enhancements in future
- Re-platform the solution from a classic ASP to contemporary ASP.NET to provide future proofing
- Add scalability to accommodate greater traffic in future
- Create a generic solution to allow more reuse of content, and to enable external systems to consume the most up to date pricing data
Solution
Working very closely with Warner Leisure's IT team from the outset, Building Blocks systematically set about the redevelopment to fulfil the brief:
- The application reuses content created for Warner Leisure's website and stored in the SDL Tridion CMS, such as hotel information
- A combination of ASP.NET 3.5 and WCF application interface supports a Service Orientated Architecture
- Updated caching and security
- Scalability - The redeveloped engine provides extensive scope for future capacity growth
- Increased robustness and dependable performance combine to maintain maximum uptime
- Package upselling is supported by readily available hotel details, imagery and attractive extras