There is probably no industry that suffered a stronger blow during the pandemic than is the case with the tourism & travel industry. Surely, other industries and economic sectors were hit at the same time, but still to a lesser extent. The tourism & travel industry and its companies simply stopped when states enforced worldwide lockdowns and travel bans.
As tourism and travel are exponents of the hospitality sector, we could say that something needed to be done across the whole sector – and done fast – after introducing less restrictive measures. This was where technology stepped in, as some of the major technologies in software development, but also in the hardware domain, promptly made things easier. Nowadays, we can hear a lot about artificial intelligence, machine learning and IoT in terms of hospitality, together with industry-wide robotization and automatization efforts. Hospitality exponents, hotels and restaurant chains want to enable seamless and frictionless experiences for their clients and customers. Technology is here to lend a helping hand in this digitalization effort.
Even though hospitality companies nowadays have their in-house development teams and IT departments, the truth is that many of them are simply small or inexperienced. That is why big and appreciated hospitality companies are teaming up with their software development counterparts.
This is the precise reason why we can proudly say that we were trusted partners in one of these transformation paths. Together with our client, respected hospitality company Valamar Riviera, we have dived into this process, and we can say that results exceeded our mutual expectations when we started the project.
Challenges our Client Faced
Valamar wanted us to create a new central room register and pricing platform for all its properties. The new platform needed to solve:
- issues and burdens around the initial preparation and creation of prices and price lists
- the burden of converting and importing various price lists into the property management system, online booking engine
- creating excerpts or whole price lists for the agencies.
- seamless integration of pricing plans with budgeting plans (the volume plans).
Creating the new platform allowed Valamar to manage room registers in one place, from descriptions and capacity to images. The workload on Excel documents was reduced. In addition, price conversion and the preparation of various price lists was simplified.
Also, in the later phase, it was made possible to compare the prices of several facilities/units as well as to do graphical analysis of prices that at the time was done manually using excel, and to export data from multiple systems.
The plan was to integrate the new platform with all possible IT solutions used in the organization and required open architecture which shall relatively easily enable future integrations.
Solution & Technologies
Serengeti participated in the design and overall development of both background (back-end) and presentation layer of the Room Register and Pricing application (front-end).
Development was based on Angular 13 integrated with Prime NG framework on the front-end and .NET 6 on the back-end side. The project was based on classical onion architecture with implemented generic repository pattern and EF core as ORM on MS SQL Server.
Versioning of the program code was based on GIT and took place according to the development phase (dev, feature, prod), based on GIT Flow.
Thankfully, we can say that, together with great client co-coordination, periodical sprints and constructive meetings, we have successfully enrolled this whole project into the next phase, and we can hardly wait to see what the future brings. Right now, we would like to mention that our client's satisfaction with how we completed this project made us partners in another sub-project. So far, so good.
Many interesting trends and technology applications, mutually interconnected, are currently being researched and deployed in the hospitality industry. For a technology company like ours, it is of a vital importance not to be just a bystander in this process, but to become and stay a key player and, together with cherry-picked partners, leaders in many other hospitality sector transformation paths – just like this one.
Find out how Serengeti can provide you with solutions to your business challenges.
