Travel Comparison and Booking Engine to Personalize Trip Planning

Business challenge

For years, our client, Europe’s leading travel tech startup, has been working to build an easy-to-use global search and booking platform to help travelers get around. This travel booking software combines all modes of transportation — trains, buses, cars, planes — in one search to let users find the fastest, cheapest, and most comfortable travel options.

Having experienced massive international growth, the company decided to expand into new markets. Their next strategic step was to extend their travel services to Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) as well as to the Nordic countries. However, to scale their cloud-based platform and cover new travel destinations, they needed to strengthen their engineering team by partnering with a proven booking system development provider.

Intellias became their partner of choice and took on responsibility for the technical side of the product, supporting its coverage of CEE and Nordic countries. This initial engagement with our client has evolved into a solid, ongoing collaboration.

Travel booking solution

Alongside our client’s team, Intellias engineers have been working on a backend solution to increase the number of convenient transportation connections. To provide the necessary scalability, we created and now maintain a cloud-based infrastructure that powers the platform’s support for newly added countries, routes, and transport modes.

The platform connects its newest countries with all other areas of service via various modes of transport so travelers can search for and book multiple modes of transportation for their journeys. The solution includes powerful filtering and analytics tools, marketing automation algorithms, and local mapping techniques to provide users with a smooth search, booking, and travel experience. At our client’s request we can add new rail, air, and bus transportation services. In this way, our team compiles and seamlessly integrates massive amounts of information from multiple data sources, making more destinations, routes, and service providers available for travelers.

After successfully integrating with their travel partners in Central and Eastern Europe as well as the Nordic countries, our client decided to grow their Intellias Coverage Team and to set up new teams with Intellias to further scale their platform. We’ve assisted our client in gaining a strong position in the Mediterranean region and are now helping them fuel a new push into the North American market.

Currently, Intellias teams are working on five major integration projects for our client:

1. Air travel data integration

The travel aggregator tool combines ground and air transportation, enabling travelers to view their journeys from start to finish, including alternate airport options. Our team has been integrating on-site booking for airlines, allowing users to book flights directly on the platform.

2. Big integrations

As our client is now launching in the USA, we’re helping them meet the demands of this next significant stage of growth. Our engineers are the main workforce integrating American transit providers and transportation companies.

3. Local integrations

Several Intellias teams are involved in the ongoing process of expanding coverage as more transport companies and modes of transportation are added to our client’s network.

4. Support of completed integrations

We maintain the platform’s existing integrations across multiple regions, countries, and transportation suppliers.

5. Station accuracy

To address inconsistencies in timetables, station names, and location coordinates across numerous providers, we launched a station unification project to bring all station data into a uniform format. Our team of developers has built this solution from scratch, and our data operators are constantly working on verifying data.

We’ve already processed 200,000+ stations across Europe and created a comprehensive European station database. We are verifying the exact positioning of stations on Google Maps, correcting their coordinates, editing the translations of station names, and linking them to cities and regions.

Business outcome

One of the biggest achievements of the Intellias team has been the continuous delivery of new high-quality features and integrations. Since the beginning of this project, our metrics — indicating the success of integration for the markets delegated to Intellias — have been performing at 100%, compared to 60% and 70% for other markets. We’ve been providing our client with full-cycle integration of new travel service providers in Europe, from requirements analysis to continuous monitoring and testing.

As our client continues to look beyond Europe and build their global roadmap, the number of new projects is growing. And so is the need for Intellias engineering resources. With every new location and mode of transport, we acquire new responsibilities and get requests for new teams. Our client’s strategic plans to launch ferries in the near future and expand into the Asian market in the long run will further strengthen our partnership and bring our client closer to unifying transport across the world.

Currently, our client’s booking solution is available in 18 languages and operates in 36 European countries. It serves more than 800 transport companies, increasing direct ticket sales and overall coverage. The platform helps 27 million monthly users from 120 countries plan their journeys to 100,000+ destinations across Europe using a tool that brings together European rail, bus, and air travel infrastructure.

The solution we’re developing allows travelers to:

• Access data from various transport operators in a simple, user-friendly format in one place
• Check all possible travel options at a glance with transparent pricing and info on journey times and modes of transport — all in the traveler’s native language and currency
• Plan journeys by comparing and combining transport options and plotting the fastest and cheapest routes to destinations across the world
• Book tickets hassle-free with the possibility to change direction, destination, and duration on the go
• Save money and spend less time planning trips and more time enjoying them