Travel booking platform
development case study

Sharing Onix’s experience in building a travel booking system

TravelBid is a platform where travelers can book a hotel room or holiday home, order an airport transfer, or rent a car in Cyprus. Instead of using traditional booking engines like Booking.com or Expedia, they can enter their trip details on TravelBid and within minutes get direct offers from over 14K local businesses.

Industry

Travel and Booking

Team size

8 Specialists

Location

Cyprus

The problems
TravelBid solves

Service providers like hotels or car rental agencies sell highly perishable products and can’t afford to be idle: a hotel room night can’t be sold tomorrow. A 50% discount is better than no sale at all, but businesses are reluctant to publicize prices below their average pricing level.

Ralph Schonfelder, the client, decided to create a travel booking system for business owners to offer special deals when the demand is low without publishing prices below market average on popular booking engines.

For price-sensitive travelers, the platform offers opportunities to book special local deals they would find nowhere else. Without searching, emailing, and calling dozens of service providers, they can receive an offer tailored specifically to their needs.

How the
platform works

The system distinguishes two categories of users:

Customers – travelers
Vendors – travel and hospitality service providers

Customers can post inquiries for booking accommodation, airport transfer, or rental car.
For example:

01
A customer looking for an airport transfer on October 10th places a request on the website.
02
The customer views the offers from local taxi and transfer companies and selects the most suitable one.
03
They can communicate with a vendor using the in-app chat.
04
The customer books the chosen service on the platform and pays with a credit card or via PayPal.
05
The customer receives an invoice.

In the same case, a transport service uses
the vendors’ interface of the platform:

01
To view a request for their service on October 10th
02
To submit a quote for the trip
03
To chat with the customer
04
To receive a confirmation of the booking
05
To receive the payment

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Beginning of the
travel booking portal development

The client provided Onix with the software requirement specification (SRS) document. The creation of the UX/UI design began with carefully studying the client’s requirements and references.

Immediately after that, the designers analyzed the major players in the market, such as Airbnb, Booking.com, trivago, and others. Their task was to make the future app’s user flow as straightforward and convenient as possible.

This information helped the designer create
the user flow, wireframes, and then a clickable prototype of the website.

The designer came up with several smart solutions that make the interface
user-friendlier:

Post your trip

She divided the inquiry form into several steps to facilitate a quick and easy understanding and filling out.

My inquiries

The page ‘My inquiries‘ displays the inquiries as cards with essential information and the number of offers for each, so the user instantly understands how many options they have.

Offer details

Displaying the traveler’s requirements on the offers page along with detailed information on each offer helps users quickly compare what they need with what each provider offers.

Design process

Simultaneously, the designer assembled a mood board with examples of different styles.

After the client approved the screens, the designer started working on the UI design. The homepage took several iterations made by two designers before the client liked one of the suggested concepts.

Thus we settled on a clean light design with key elements highlighted with bright colors.

01
Three types of gradient were designed to help users quickly understand that the site offers three types of services: lodgings booking, car rentals, and transfers.
02
The main gradient includes orange hues associated with the sun, beach cocktails, and fruit, and thus vacations and fun.
03
Photos of happy travelers were added to reinforce the message.

The chosen style was applied
to the other pages.

Logo Design
for the platform

After minor changes, the client finally approved the UI design of the travel booking app and requested a logo for the platform. At first, he wanted a generic sign suitable for a travel business. However, we convinced the client that the new service deserved a unique logo to make it recognizable.

The designer created many concepts of the logo, playing around with the idea of flights, planes, and birds, and presented each on the home page layout and with different backgrounds before the client accepted the sign that pleased him, suited the business, and fit in with the style of the platform. It’s basically a combination of a stylized plane and the initial “t” from TravelBid.

Finally, the designer adapted the
web interface for mobile browsers.

The designer used Figma to develop the wireframes, visual design, prototype, and logo and color palette for the platform.

Communication with the client was facilitated with a project management service like Trello. The client created a project, created various tasks, and wrote all his requirements and corrections there.

After the client approved the final design, the team proceeded with programming the travel booking platform.

The travel booking platform development process

After the design stage, Onix proceeded to build the travel booking system.

The development team included 4 specialists:

front-end developer
back-end developer
quality assurance (QA) engineers
project manager/SCRUM master

The development process comprised 3 steps:

feature coding
pre-production release and testing
production release

The chosen SCRUM project management implied

dividing the product into features/user stories and prioritizing them
feature delivery in short release cycles (sprints) of 1-2 weeks
short daily meetings to discuss tasks and solve issues
sprint reviews to evaluate each delivered feature, get feedback, and plan improvements

The tools used by the team included

GitLab
JetBrains IDE
Jira
Postman
Slack
TestRail

The development was completed in 3.5 months.
Thanks to a clear list of product requirements and Agile project management, the team delivered the planned features in a timely manner, with few change requests from the client.

Travel booking portal development technology stack

Onix's developers programmed the platform's front-end and back-end applications using Vue.js and Node.js, respectively.
They had to use some JavaScript libraries and integrate them into Vue.js to build a mobile-friendly front-end.
The server infrastructure was set up on the client's AWS account.
socket.io was used for real-time messaging. In case an extraordinary number of messages are sent simultaneously, a queue is formed if the server doesn't process other requests.
Stripe and PayPal were integrated to support online payments.

Result and prospects

TravelBid was launched in June 2022.
Soon, the platform counted 14K+ service providers and was adding up to 5K new users monthly.

Travel booking platformdevelopment case study

The problems TravelBid solves

How the platform works

Customers can post inquiries for booking accommodation, airport transfer, or rental car. For example:

In the same case, a transport service usesthe vendors’ interface of the platform: