IMPORTANT NOTICE!
Client
End Users
Project Overview
Our client is a forward-thinking company offering a groundbreaking platform for hotels and hotel networks. This platform provides hotels with the tools and expertise they need to act as their own Online Travel Agencies (OTAs), enabling direct bookings and delivering exceptional customer experiences. Beyond just offering room bookings, the platform allows hotels to sell complete vacation packages, bundling accommodations with flights and other services, increasing their profitability by enhancing commission opportunities.
Additionally, the platform integrates seamlessly with third-party solutions, such as property management systems (PMS) and booking engines, under a transparent transaction-based fee structure. This eliminates the complexity of managing multiple systems and vendors, giving hotels the flexibility to focus on delivering superior services. By empowering independent hotels and large hotel chains to maximize their direct sales potential, the platform provides a critical competitive edge in the hospitality industry.
The overarching business objectives for this project included:
- Reducing Costs: Streamlining the platform’s cloud infrastructure to significantly lower operating expenses.
- Enhancing Reliability: Ensuring the platform could handle high transaction volumes and complex integrations without downtime or performance issues.
- Improving Financial Health: Aligning infrastructure and operational strategies with broader business development goals to sustain and enhance the company’s competitive position.
Challenges
The project presented several pressing challenges, requiring a tailored approach to meet the client’s needs within strict constraints:
- Time Sensitivity: The platform migration needed to be executed rapidly to avoid service disruptions, as the existing infrastructure was nearing obsolescence.
- Complex Service Ecosystem: The client’s platform encompassed diverse services, integrations with third-party tools, and a need to onboard modern PMSs like Opera Cloud and partners like Shift4 and IBS Software. Migrating these seamlessly without impacting existing operations was critical.
- Outdated Technology: The reliance on legacy Azure services and older frameworks increased the risk of performance bottlenecks and limited the platform’s ability to scale with growing demand.
- Scalability and Performance: The system needed to handle large transaction volumes while ensuring reliability in processing messages, payments, and integrations. This necessitated overhauling message queues and middleware.
- Extended Onboarding Times: The platform’s intricate nature required new hotels and chains to undergo a six-month onboarding period, limiting the speed of scaling operations.
Solution
To address these challenges, Artelogic implemented a comprehensive set of technical and strategic solutions, ensuring both short-term efficiency gains and long-term scalability:
- Technology Migration: The platform was migrated to a modern technology stack, addressing obsolescence issues and ensuring future compatibility. A significant update to Microsoft Orleans was completed, improving the performance and reliability of the platform’s distributed systems.
- Containerized Infrastructure: Implemented a containerized solution using technologies like Docker and orchestrated deployments, enabling faster updates and seamless scaling of services.
- Modernized Azure Services: Transitioned from outdated Azure services to the latest cloud offerings, leveraging enhanced capabilities for storage, processing, and scalability.
- Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC): Introduced Terraform to define and automate infrastructure deployments. This not only reduced manual errors but also provided greater flexibility for future updates and disaster recovery.
- Message Processing Optimization: Optimized high-volume transaction processing using Azure queues, ensuring reliable and efficient communication with third-party integrations.
- Seamless Integration with New PMSs: Integrated advanced property management systems like Opera Cloud and updated existing connections with IBS Software and Shift4, enabling broader functionality for hotel clients.
- Enhanced Booking Engine: Developed a new booking engine to serve as a middleware, facilitating smoother integration between the platform and third-party systems and simplifying the onboarding process for new hotel clients.
Result
The solutions implemented by Artelogic delivered measurable improvements across all critical areas of the client’s business:
- Significant Cost Savings: By modernizing the cloud infrastructure and introducing containerized solutions, the client achieved a substantial reduction in infrastructure costs, freeing up resources for reinvestment in business growth.
- Drastically Improved Performance: The platform experienced major performance enhancements, including faster transaction processing, reduced latency, and near-zero downtime. This elevated user satisfaction and increased platform reliability for end clients.
- Expanded Service Capabilities: The integration of Opera Cloud and the new booking engine enabled the platform to support additional functionalities and handle complex client needs more effectively, strengthening its competitive advantage.
- Scalability and Future-Readiness: The use of Terraform and containerization ensured the platform could adapt to fluctuating demand and scale seamlessly as the client’s user base continued to grow.
- Operational Efficiency: Enhanced support workflows and optimized message handling systems improved the platform’s uptime and reliability, reducing support response times and boosting client confidence.
