Case Study
Customizing the Travel Portal Experience
Global travel management firm (company confidential)
A firm specializing in global travel management worked with SDG on a new portal experience for business travelers.
Challenges
100,000+ independent websites
Multi-lingual support
Deep customization requirements
Integrations
SDG Solutions
Project delivery
Solution architecture
Application development
DevOps & Infrastructure
A global travel management firm overhauls its digital portal
A global business travel management company maintained an online portal that served over two million active travelers and travel arrangers. This portal was critical to the company’s operations, as it enabled important services like travel management, traveler care, and meetings and events.
This portal, which the company implemented years prior, was overdue for an update. The technology was limited in its ability to customize and personalize content for customers with contextually relevant information. Even minor changes were expensive and time consuming. Moreover, the company felt its relationship with its portal vendor was cumbersome, and they needed more control over a responsive development environment that could address their future vision and serve their customers better.
The vision
The company collaborated with SDG to define a portal that would:
- Allow them to customize and personalize content.
- Bring more control in-house, rather than using a vendor for updates.
- Have one easy login for users.
- Provide a world-class experience for travelers and bookers.
- Support 16 languages.
Building the solution together
To realize this vision and tackle these challenges, the company engaged SDG, whose portal expertise helped them make sound decisions about their new portal. In the old environment, updating content and adding features was expensive and slow. SDG implemented an architecture to simplify changes, reduce long-term maintenance costs, and deliver a more consistent branded experience while still allowing customization. The new solution was able to integrate data from diverse sources, allow fine-grained control over permissions and organizational hierarchy, and offer flexible templating to support thousands of discrete customer sites.
Solution features
- Manages the client/sub-unit hierarchy with organizations and site templates.
- Enables rapid deployment of content and functional changes across all sites.
- Allows selective propagation of content by a client to their sub-units.
- Customizes content and functionality through roles and permissions for both the sub-unit and individuals.
- Includes custom portlets that integrate with trip and hotel data sources.
Roles played by SDG
- Agile project delivery and management
- Solution architecture
- Business analysis
- Enterprise architecture
- Application development
- Infrastructure and DevOps support
- Documentation and training
Technologies used
- Liferay DXP
- Java
- Hibernate
- Maven
- Tomcat
- MySQL
- ElasticSearch
- HTML5
- Javascript
- React/Redux
- Docker
The result: a single environment serving 140,000 websites
The company now hosts its portal platform internally, integrating the core platform with data from a variety of sources. This single environment serves over 140,000 websites in 16 languages. The company has also used this environment to launch a second brand on a second virtual instance, leveraging much of the custom code and infrastructure from the original implementation. They continue to help their customers lower travel costs and help make the art of travel and travel booking easier for their clients.
