adria-part.eu

We got to know the adria-part.eu project while it was still just an idea: we took part in developing the basic concept of the online travel agency. In the counselling phase we helped our client to plan the functionality of the online agency and also helped in the fields of visual design, marketing and search engine optimization – through the emerging common understanding did we base our development.

The core of the services, available for the customers, are the ability to quickly and efficiently find the right accommodation for their holidays, the possibility to get to know this accommodation through written description and photo galleries, and last but not least book the accommodation as simply as possible but still in appropriate detail with precisely calculated prices. Besides the elegant appearance and necessary functions it worth to mention the multilingual support – presently the site operates in three languages but this can be widened at will without making serious modifications in the software operating the site, which is the result of the farsighted designing.

The real challenge however was not the user interface but the development of the background system. Even though the basis of the system is a complex and multifaceted business logic, still this should not be observable on the user interface but on the administrative side the system should offer a comfortable, rich in function and effective interface for the full-fledged management opportunities. The work of the employees behind the adria-part.eu project – the helpdesk, the content maintenance team, the network of agents contracting the accommodation providers and the administrators – is held together by our development, so instead of a simple booking site we created the complex management system of a travel agency.

For the everyday administration the system relies on the following information:

• users: the system is used by users with different permission level, these levels offer accessibility to different functions
• services: a registry of the available services at the different types of accommodations (hotel, apartment, etc.). This includes the availability of such services as TV, air-conditioning, all-inclusive, designated parking lot, and so on. A service can be accommodation or person based, and it is possible to define, either in a percentage or in sum format, the difference between the purchase and selling prices, this will be important during price calculation.
• accommodations: besides the basic data descriptions photos, rooms and other available information can be attached to the accommodation. The data regarding the accommodations can be entered by lower level administrators, who after their job are done forward it to their superiors, who in turn after verification can either approve or reject the entered data, the system handles this possibility through ratification functions.
• rooms of accommodations: besides the basic data descriptions photos, other available information and prices can be attached to it.
• The price structure is one of the most complex parts of the system. Prices can be attached to services (accommodation, spare-bed, parking lot etc.); the prices of a service (both purchase and selling prices) can be fixed for seasons in advance. The prices can vary according to age (children can get discount prices on spare-beds, as it is the usual practice). It is possible to jointly price the rooms of an accommodation, to define the discounts (either in percentage or sum format), and if necessary it can be limited to certain periods. Discounts can be globally attached to services which can be overruled by the discounts of the different accommodations. In the course of the data entry the system automatically calculates a selling price according to the purchase price and the values defined for the services but this can be manually modifiable.
• The system handles discount prices with "add" logic: this means that not the existing price is modified but a new promotional price is paired with the original price. The benefit of this is the easier management of promotional prices.
• The accommodations are dedicated to towns, and the towns are dedicated to regions, this way the accommodations are searchable according to different geographical criteria.
• an accommodation can be attached through a contract to an owner, but one owner can have several contracts with adria-part.eu. The system can manage contract information and an owner registry.
• group pricing: the administrators can simultaneously define the different service prices for several accommodations looked up according to detailed search conditions.
• booking management: the bookings are rendered for the helpdesk by the system, this can prevent the possibility of more than one employee dealing with the same accommodations. The main operation on a booking is the change of status when certain occurrences (approval/rejection of booking according to the actual booking situation, arrival of deposit, full payment, etc.) befall.
• e-mail management: the e-mails sent if a change in status occurs can be freely defined (more than one action can be dedicated to the different states, i.e. multiple addressees (owner/customer), even in several languages, with attachments, etc.); e-mail templates can be created into which the actual data is inserted.
• If a hotel has only two types of rooms but a hundred of each then the data entry, despite all the comfortable functions, would be an enormous task. Because of that it is possible to create 'roomgroups' by changing only one setting: in this case the system acts as if of the given room a given number had been entered. This meant that the management of availability of a room became a very complex challenge since the system had to be able to calculate, with the help of a very elaborate algorithm, how to assign the arrived bookings in a roomgroup which was represented by only one room.
• description management: since the system was developed parallel with the forming of the business processes in some cases it had to be more flexible if we could have based the system on an already operating business model. Such field was the description management: the "standardization" of information collected on accommodations, the form for collecting information was constantly changing so for the management of this a user friendly though complex description managing module had to be created, where the single descriptive information (for example distance from the sea, owner lives on site, etc.) can be flexibly created with a couple of clicks without modifying the system itself.
• content functions: management of accentuated content (defining the accommodations that have an accentuated position on the site), creating content pages (for the description of the services, towns and regions)
• for a better traceability the system automatically logs every operation (any kind of data entry, modification, deletion) recording the name of the person executing the changes and also the time of these changes and recording the data that was created/modified/deleted.

Of course the launch of the site was a big step for the enterprise, after all, our customer faced a new challenge with prepared employees but with so far untested processes. The critical question at this point is how will the customers find the new website? The answer for that problem laid partly in the search engine optimized site structure which helps the site to climb up in the search engines, but the online marketing played a crucial role in which we also helped the team of adria-part.eu.

The company was start up successfully, thanks to the well organized work, and the prudentially designed system this continuously developing enterprise performs perfectly in comparison with its competitors.